This paper is part of a project examining movement skill problems in an educational setting, and aims to provide guidelines for the assessment and management of movement problems within the primary school. The first part of the project reported here involves teachers assessing children on tasks they perform in day to day school life. A Motor Competence Checklist (MCC) was developed and tested on 350 seven- and nine-year-old children. Developmental differences were shown on every section of the MCC, and in the bottom 10 per cent of scores boys outnumbered girls by a ratio between 2 and 3 to 1. The nature of movement problems was examined by analysing profiles of children identified by the MCC, and the resulting profiles suggest there is a need to move away from viewing children with movement problems as an homogeneous group.