Primary school assessment in the UK has become a hot political issue in recent months.

The accurate assessment, tracking and reporting of pupil performance is vital to ensuring that the right steps can be taken to shape a child’s learning and tailor learning experiences to match progress while keeping parents and management informed.

How to do this on a national level has been in the news frequently in recent weeks as the government has come under pressure on how it tracks the performance of primary school children.

First, there was controversy over the trial of national spelling tests where questions from practice papers were used in the official trial.

Key Stage 2 SATs

Now this week the government has come under fire due to parents taking their children out of school for a day in protest at key stage 2 SATs

The Daily Mail summarised the issue

“Families have pulled their children out of class as part of a nationwide demonstration against the exams for six and seven-year-olds, which they claim put schoolchildren ‘through hell’ and too stressed to eat or sleep.

Critics claim the children in Year 2 is causing mental health problems – while some parents say their children are being ‘set up to fail’ so the Tories can force through its academies plans.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said today it was wrong for parents to force young children to strike because: ‘Even missing a day’s school can be damaging.’”

This issue that saw more than 2,000 six and seven-year-old pupils taken out of school highlights how emotive testing and performance tracking can be.

It is important that schools continue to invest in making the assessment, tracking and reporting of pupil progress as efficient and as user-friendly as possible in a complex education setting.

This is why at Aspiring Panda, we developed the School Reporting Suite (SRS), our reporting software, that makes tracking and reporting pupil progress simple to manage.

Find out more at http://schoolreportingsuite.com/