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UK School Assessment Reporting – No New Tests Before 2018

The UK school assessment reporting process from schools has been under review and subject to multiple changes under the current government.

This has affected all key stages and is likely to continue as consultations and reviews into effective ways of monitoring, tracking and reporting children’s progress are planned by the UK government.

This makes the challenge for key stakeholders to make sure that their own internal monitoring, tracking and reporting systems allow them to stay on top of changing regulatory requirements in line with the national curriculum and their own reporting needs.

In October the Education secretary Justine Greening announced some policy decisions in a statement to parliament. One of which was that there would be no new tests implemented before 2018.

No New Tests Before 2018

Teachers, school senior management teams, parents and children have had to adapt to a number of different changes in how pupil progress is assessed, monitored and reported on a local and national level.

Therefore, there may be some relief that there are no new tests for children in the UK education system before 2018. This is said to be designed to bring in a greater level of stability to schools over the coming 12 months.

With so many changes the reaction to this and the scrapping of key stage 1 resits (link to other blog) have been positively received by the Naswut teaching union.

Christine Keates the head of the union stating

“It appears that the Secretary of State has now recognised the real challenges around statutory end of key-stage assessment.

“The recognition that there were problems with the 2015/16 data, and that because of this no schools should face harsh sanctions solely on the basis of that data, is a welcome step towards relieving the pressure and anxiety some schools have been experiencing.”

Primary School Assessment In UK Remains Controversial

May 11, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

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/

How Would Your School Handle A Digital Detox

March 25, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

Digital technology has taken over our lives in recent years.

The invention of smart phones and the mobile internet and Wi-Fi infrastructure that has grown to support them means that we can be online virtually anywhere.

One generation that the digital revolution has affected the most are school age children.

There are now generations of children growing up that are digitally native, they have never lived in a world where information and communication was not at their fingertips 24/7. Children are drawn to technology from an early age and it seems to come naturally to them.

Teens in the UK, like most everywhere else in the world, are incredibly digitally literate. Smartphone adoption is sky high and by 2013, 8 out of 10 UK teens had a smart phone, using it for browsing the web, playing games and using social media.

Young people are estimated to be only for 27 hours a week and there is concern that is too much and children are becoming dependent on being connected.

Last week the BBC put together an interesting experiment to see how high school students would cope with a weeklong digital detox.

“Digital detox refers to a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic connecting devices such as smartphones and computers. It is regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world.”

It was insightful to see how the students use the technology and how different their experience of the world is to their parents.

All quite endearing it shows just how important digital has become in the behaviours of the next generation. This will affect how they respond to how they find and absorb information and how they communicate with each other.

Kodesh Curriculum Case Study

March 11, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

At School Reporting Suite we know that our software can handle the complexities of running a system in English and Hebrew, whilst reporting on the Kodesh and national curricula.

We know this because we have implemented it within a Jewish school in Golders Green and the results and response from the school has been phenomenal.

The Menorah Primary School Case Study

The Menorah Primary School, is an orthodox Jewis school founded in 1944 by the Golders Green Beth Hamedrash. They contacted Aspiring Panda the company that created the School Reporting Suite looking for tracking and annual reporting software for the school.

Two of the key requirements that the software were

It could be written to and edited in Hebrew
It could be fully customised to suit the subjects and grading criteria of the school’s Jewish studies curriculum

What We Did

Aspiring Panda implemented a cloud based version of the School Reporting Suite to accommodate the Jewish Study Curriculum and he school’s grading criteria.

Using the language settings of the software we allowed the system to be written to and edited in Hebrew and accessed from anywhere with an internet connection.

The Reaction Of The School

The implementation of the software went smoothly, teachers found it convenient and easy to use and the head teacher reported that time efficiencies were achieved due to standardised formatting which reduced writing and review time.

Parental feedback was also extremely positive, particularly on the professional style and quality of the reports.

Here is what the head of the school had to say after the first year of using SRS.

“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! Layout is comprehensive without being cluttered and print copy is aesthetic and ready to send to parents. We now have the tools to generate full reports and charts on classes, groups and individual students in all their subjects and categories. We can track, assess, compare and plan – all within one software package.
Thank you, Aspiring Panda! Your customer service is ‘top-shelf’ with immediate and effective response to all our technical enquiries.”

Atlas, Principal

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

January 15, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

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.

Overcoming The School Reporting Challenge

December 18, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

At Aspiring Panda the developers of the School Reporting Suite, we passionately believe that our reporting solution can help improve a number of different aspects of the school reporting challenge.

Our proprietary pupil assessment, tracking and reporting system is designed to overcome the challenges of even the most dynamic teaching environments that many other solutions do not.

Configured To Any Curriculum

With so many different types of schools and curriculum across the world, we have developed our system to be configured to work with any curriculum grading scheme. If there is more than one curriculum being followed, this can be done within one system rather than having to be operate two independently of each other.

We provide the schools the training and support they need to implement an easy to use system that suits their requirements.

Supports Multiple Languages

With schools particularly those that are faith based communicating in more than one language, we have developed our system to allow users to toggle between different languages with ease.

This can help schools manage multiple curriculums and communicate effectively with parents.

Custom Reporting Design

To overcome the school reporting challenge, we let schools access the information they want to see in the format that works best for their needs. This means that teachers and senior management can access the information they want to see, displayed in the way they want to see it in real time.

This increases engagement with the information and can make identifying trends and areas that require attention easier to identify.

Can Be Accessed By Teachers From Anywhere

With our cloud solution teachers can access and update their pupil reports from anywhere with an internet connection. This allows teachers to manage their time more effectively, particularly wif they are taking their marking home or getting some work done when the school is closed.

This flexibility is extremely popular with users of the School Reporting Suite.

The Six Week Summer Holiday Myth

September 16, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

We work with many different schools operating on different models and curricula and they all tell us that the most stressful and important times in the school calendar is the end of year exam and reporting period.

Thankfully this is now at an end and schools up and down the country have been coming to the end of their school year and starting the long summer break.

Yet as the children leave and the school gates are locked behind them, teachers, management and administrative staff are already thinking of next year.

Whilst we do not want to ruin the first weeks of holiday for the teachers reading, we acknowledge that whilst there is time to relax and recharge. We all know the “six week summer holiday” for teachers is a myth, some of you may even be reading this from your school or classroom as you opt to do as much as you can at the start of your holiday.

The changing curricula means that time saving planning from years gone by may need tweaking or rewriting entirely. In a rapidly changing and high pressure education system, There is planning, preparation and action to be taken to get ready for another physically and mentally demanding school year.

The ongoing pressures on teachers are something we are aware of at School Reporting System and we are working hard to ensure that where possible we can make the bit after the summer as easy to manage as possible from a reporting perspective.

We know that when implemented our solutions can save administrators and teachers alike time by making the reporting process easier and increasing the ease of performance tracking and report generation.

Giving teachers more time and less admin is our goal and in the meantime we wish the hardworking educators of Britain happy holidays.

Technology Is Intertwined With Teaching

August 27, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

Since the invention of the abacus, technology has been shaping the way children are educated. Things have changed a little since ancient times, with recent advances in technology happening at a staggering rate.

It is only 30 years ago that computers started to be commonplace in schools. Yet, now they are an indispensible teaching tool. This is not only due to the access to information they can give children of all ages, but also has to do with the central role that technology plays in the lives of students, both now and in the future.

We now live in a digital economy. As a result, the ability to use technology effectively will be a key tool for students once they finish their studies and begin looking for a job.

This means that technology needs to be intertwined with the way that children are educated. Schools are adapting quickly, with more than 70% of schools giving pupils access to tablet computers during the learning process.

In nearly 10% of schools, each student has their own tablet device. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of tablet computers in schools is expected to rise from about 430,000 to almost 900,000.

What Next

Technology is going to continue to evolve. The challenge for schools will be to continue to adapt to get the best results for children. In an article for the BBC, Dr Clarke of the University of Cambridge spoke about the role of technology and how it will evolve:

“The type of device might change, but it’s not going to go away. It will almost seem ridiculous if some of them are not using technology,” she said.

Moving forwards, the challenge is always going to be finding the balance between adopting technology and keeping the focus on knowledge. This is particularly salient given the distraction that technology can provide, which is something that has had some senior figures in education wanting to discuss the banning of mobile phones and even iPads in schools.

Tip of The Week – Coping With School Reporting Season

June 17, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

As the weather gets better and the summer break creeps into view, it brings mixed blessings; for one thing pupils can be harder to motivate as they drift into holiday mode. Then, of course, there are the reports to write.

Traditionally, reporting is a time consuming and laborious task, that involves scouring through previous tests, reports, and notes in order to put together more than 20 reports. These need to be typed up, checked, reviewed, and amended before they get anywhere near a parent.

This produces stress, long hours, and is enough to test the patience and will of even the most driven and experienced of teachers.

The process of writing reports can vary widely from school to school: some rely on the traditional paper based model, whilst others look to cloud based software to manage pupil tracking and report generation.

Regardless of what system your school uses, we asked our resident teacher to give us their top tip on how to cope with the school reporting season.

The tip they gave revolves around having the tools to hand to craft unique and engaging reports with a little help from a structural crib sheet.

Have a crib sheet of useful comments to hand

Parents want to know how their children are getting on in a clear and easy to understand way. Next to the CTRL – C copy shortcut embedded in your brain, having a list of useful comments in your mind can save time and add depth to your reports.

These key phrases could include things like “grasps new concepts quickly”, or has a “lively imagination”, which help paint a picture of the child’s progress.

If you are still struggling for ideas, we found this inspiring and quirky book on “how to survive the first year of teaching” which has useful tips even for those whose first year of teaching was long ago.

3 Ways SRS Can Save Teachers Time

June 4, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

Regardless of the idealised image that those outside the profession may have, we all know that despite the rewards, teaching can be a challenging vocation.

Teachers need to work within a supportive environment, where they can develop their skills, feel valued, and transfer this into a positive teaching environment.

One of the ways that schools can do this is to ensure that their teachers have the tools they need to succeed. These can be tools that make it a little easier to perform admin, to track progress, and to communicate effectively with the different stakeholders in their role – such as parents, pupils, and the management team.

SRS Reduces Report Admin Time

One way that SRS can support teachers is by making the admin involved in student performance tracking simpler and easier to monitor and manage. The system can be cloud based, which allows teachers to update it from any device in any location. This also means that teachers can access the system outside of school hours, as it is conveniently available 24 hours a day.

SRS Enhances Tracking

The SRS system allows for results and progress to be tracked for classes and individual children in line with the school curriculum, whether that is a national curriculum or one bespoke to the school or faith.

On the back of this, reports can be generated on an individual student basis, which in time provides a powerful analytical tool.

SRS as a Communication Tool

Using our cloud based system, reports can be submitted to management for review electronically, and comments added that can then be incorporated, saving time and effort at both ends. We have also received great feedback from parents about this service.

When you think back to your schooldays, you may remember being given a school report in an envelope which you nervously handed to your parents hoping the news was good. This was a long process for review, and getting comments back from parents could take time.

Using our cloud based system, reports can be sent to parents electronically and comments – but not amendments – added to the document and sent back.

Both of these tools mean that SRS is a powerful step forward in the way reporting is tracked and communicated in an educational environment.

School Reporting Suite

Saving Teachers Time