Brilliant teaching alone is not enough to produce the next generation of chemists. Students have to engage and grapple with the vocabulary and concepts of chemistry, explore these ideas in manageable amounts, learn from their mistakes and enjoy their success as they acquire understanding. Traditional teacher-marked homeworks do not always provide sufficient width or depth of engagement with chemistry and marking is a very hungry consumer of teachers' time. BestChoice, a virtual learning environment supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry and designed for post-16 UK students, is making a valuable contribution to providing formative assessment for learning for both students and teachers. Plans exist to expand the platform to GCSE.