This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and demonstrates that official policy has confused progression in inference with the process of a reader building a mental representation of a text. It argues that criterion-referenced statements for progression in inference are flawed. The article proposes a means of conceptualising inference so it can be operationalised for the purpose of teaching and learning in the classroom. This is exemplified and applied to an example of a standardised test.