In 2012 a new education monitoring system called the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) began collecting information about the achievement of Year 4 and Year 8 students enrolled in English-medium schools. Over the last 5 years it has had contact with over 20,000 students from more than 1,000 schools. This Assessment News takes a quick look at NMSSA and describes how it works. It also summarises some of the results from the NMSSA studies in different achievement areas and discusses how teachers and principals might draw on NMSSA's work to make sense of achievement in their own schools.