In March 2020 the world ground to a “screeching halt” (Latour, 2020) in response to a global pandemic. For many universities who engage in the work of Initial Teacher Education (ITE), the closure of schools presented them with a momentous task and challenged all to re-imagine many of the long established practices (Donlon, E., McDonald, E., Fitzsimons, S., & Sexton, P., 2020). Over the course of their four year programme, student-teachers on the Bachelor of Religious Education and English/History/Music (BREHM) degree in Dublin City University, Ireland, must complete a minimum of 30 weeks’ onsite placement in a number of partner post-primary schools (Teaching Council, 2020). As a result of the pandemic, schools tightened up on the number of ‘visitors’ to their institutions which meant that the student teacher placements were limited and the usual tutor assessment visits to schools were not possible. Nearly three hundred students would not undertake a placement onsite. The challenge was clear: a radically new placement experience would have to be designed so that students could meet the professional requirements of the Teaching Council (2020) and the University (Mohan et al., 2020). This was a catalyst to reimagine teacher assessment identity (TAI) through the lens of Xu and Brown’s (2016) conceptual framework of teacher assessment literacy in practice. Whilst the initiative employed the full conceptual framework, (see Figure 1), this paper focusses solely on the integration of assessment baseline knowledge into the programme under the seven elements proposed. Further papers will follow on the other components of the framework.