School Reporting Suite

Saving Teachers Time

Month: January 2016

Proposed Times Tables Tests Highlight The School Reporting Challenge

January 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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It was widely reported at the start of the year that the government is planning to test every pupil in England on their times tables before they leave primary school.

The times table checks will be piloted to about 3,000 pupils across 80 primary schools in the summer. If successful it will then be rolled out across the country in 2017.

Whilst there has been lots of debate on the merit of this metric as a measure of success, already opposition to the government and teachers unions have responded to the iniatives and the debate will continue even once implemented.

However this development highlights the changing school reporting dynamic. Since the last change in government we have seen wide scale changes to the way in the curriculum and the way in which children’s progress is measured.

In order to ensure that schools are able to adapt to moving goalposts there needs to be flexibility in the recording, measuring, tracking and reporting of pupil progress.

This is something that we have been mindful of when developing and maintaining the School Reporting System. The system is able to support the national curriculum and any other applicable curriculums. Whilst this makes the reporting suite perfect for faith schools, this can also have applications and allows schools to maintain adaptable solutions.

We can be sure that in the coming months and years that the scrutiny on the way in which children is educated is going to continue. There are likely to be changes fuelled by a number of factors, many of which are out of the control of individual schools.

These will need to be managed and implemented, whilst maintaining reporting visibility. We look forward to helping schools overcome the school reporting challenge in the years to come.

School Assessments A Review Of 2015

January 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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Last year saw significant changes in the way that children are assessed and how pupil progress is monitored.

The biggest shift of the last few years has been the move to stop using the levels system to measure pupil progress. These levels had been in place for a generation and their removal is a step into the unknown compared to the structure they provided.

This has put pressure on schools to make sure that they are accurately measuring pupil progress in a changing political and assessment environment.

This is something that we are working with schools to implement using our customisable assessment and reporting system to ensure that schools have the information they need to accurately monitor pupil progress.

The other significant change has been the introduction fo the new reception Baseline assessment. Although it is not yet a statutory requirement, the majority of schools have opted in.

This is primarily so they get some flexibility in how the progress of children from this measure is defined. For those that opted in pupils are measured on either the results attained or the progress made by the end of Key Stage 1.

For schools that have opted in then when they come on board pupils will solely be judged on what they have attained.

Moving forwards into 2016 we can expect to see more uncertainty and potential changes to the way achievement is monitored and reported within schools.

Already we have seen the announcement of times table testing for pupils as they leave Key Stage 1 and there will be speculation as to other yardsticks of progress the government may wish to measure across different age groups in the future.

At Aspiring Panda we will keep in line with the latest standards and ensure that those using our School Reporting Suite have the tools they need to do the job of teaching moving forward.

GCSE and A-Level Exam Remarking – The Challenges Of Assessment

January 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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GCSE’s and A-Levels are two of the most important measures of academic progress within the UK education system.

A pupil’s education is largely designed to help prepare them to take these standard examinations that can have a dramatic impact on the path that a pupil takes.

Good results can lead to a job or further education, whilst not hitting expectations can lead to re-sits or a longer term revaluation of future plans.

The process of administering the assessments, marking them and reporting back to the schools is a mammoth one that is administered by each of the different accredited exam boards.

Millions of tests are taken, marked and reported in a short period of time which creates a number of challenges around consistency in delivering and marking the assessments.

There are a growing number of of schools that are challenging the results received by pupils when they do not match previous performance or expectations.

With so much at stake for the pupils and schools it is only natural that when this occurs they take all reasonable steps to ensure pupils get the grades they deserve and that everyone gets equal treatment.

Ofqual, the exam watchdog, published that it received an incredible 572,000 queries over exam grades last year, an increase of 27% compared to the year before.

These queries have produced results, requests for papers to be remarked has resulted in more than 90,000 grades being changed during the last exam cycle nationally.

The sheer scale of the problem has caused the regulator to launch an inquiry to investigate why the results received by pupils on results day are so often being changed on appeal.

As a company that specialises in the assessment, monitoring and reporting of pupils in education, we will watch the progress of this investigation with interest.

The assessment and reporting of pupil exam results is a huge challenge, however it is one that needs to be gotten right.

Exhibiting at The National Jewish Education Conference For Primary School Teachers

January 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Next week we are proud to be exhibiting our School Reporting Suite at the National Jewish Education Conference For Primary School teachers. The event being held on the 12th of January at the London School of Jewish studies and will be an opportunity to meet educators from across the country.

Explaining Our Unique School Reporting Suite

We are delighted to be exhibiting at the conference, as we will be able to speak with delegates and explain to them how our School Reporting Suite can support both the national and Kodesh curricula.

We will be speaking about the benefits of being to track pupil progress within both national and Kodesh curricula using just one piece of software that can be used to monitor progress and seamlessly share this with management in real time.

Our Work With The Kodesh Curricula

The School Reporting Suite is designed to be the solution for faith schools looking to use more than one language and/or curriculum. We are exhibiting as we already have experience implementing our reporting suite successfully within a Jewish school.

Our work with the Menorah Primary School has been extremely successful leading the Principal to say

“We have completed our first full year’s assessment schedule using SRS, using both the tracking and reporting modules. The software fully represents our assessment ethos. It is easy to deploy and data entry is very straightforward even in Hebrew!

Thank you, Aspiring Panda! Your customer service is ‘top-shelf’ with immediate and effective response to all our technical enquiries.”

Who We Are Looking To Meet

During the conference we are looking to talk to delegates that are looking for a more efficient and effective way of reporting information within their school.

We look forward to attending on the 12th and hope that if you are attending you will come and ask us about the School Reporting Suite.

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