Teaching chemical technique has a long history going back to Michael Faraday, but assessment of chemical technique is comparatively rare in the modern teaching laboratory. In this work we aim to share our approach on teaching and assessing laboratory techniques. This is grounded in an exemplar-based approach incorporating the principles of formative assessment; whereby students have a known standard, are able to compare their efforts to the known standard, and are able to make appropriate adjustments to their work based on the standard in advance of submission for final summative assessment.