communication – School Reporting Suite

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UK Primary Assessment Updates – Resits, Punctuation, Grammar & Review

The school reporting and assessment system in the UK particularly for primary school children has been under intense review and scrutiny in recent years.

The government continues to review and suggest amendments to policies and processes that mean teachers, school senior management teams, parents and children are having to adapt to changes.

In October the Education secretary Justine Greening announced some policy decisions in a statement to parliament.

Here is a quick look at three of the announcements affecting primary assessment and children as they leave primary school and enter high school.

Maths and Reading Resits For Year 7 Entrants Will Not Be Imposed

There had been a consultation on plans to make year 7 pupils resit key stage 2 tests for children that failed to meet the “expected standard”

The UK government have now confirmed that this will now not be imposed, adding that the focus will now be on making sure children “catches up on lost ground”. There will be resit papers made available for teachers that wish to use them.

Key Stage 1 Spelling, Punctuation & Grammar Remains Non-Statutory

The key stage 1 spelling, punctuation and grammar tests have been controversial after the tests were leaked online and were postponed as a legal requirement. Greening confirmed in her statement that this would be extended for another year.

This will allow teachers and senior management teams to decide if the tests will be implemented in their schools.

Further Consultation On UK Primary assessment in the New Year

The announcements by Justine Greening may have been more about postponing the implementation of existing tests, however it is clear that this is up for review.

The government has announced it will continue the consultation on primary assessment an issue that is likely to continue to be a political football in the coming weeks, months and even years.

Dubai Schools Allow High Performing Schools To Opt Out Of Assessments

June 1, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

In Dubai high performing schools are getting the ability to opt out of regular assessments as part of a new education initiative.

This is of note as in the United Kingdom schools only have a limited amount of flexibility in the way they track, monitor and assess the progress of pupils.

Schools are required to comply with the national curriculum and the wide range of formal and informal assessments that are monitored at a local and a national level.

However, the requirement for regular assessment as part of the education process is not universally accepted and others across the UK and the world think other approaches may be more appropriate and beneficial to the learning of pupils.

The Dubai Approach

One country that has taken a different approach in schools is Dubai, where schools that are high achieving are able to opt out of regular assessments.

Arabian Business outlined the project in a recent article

“The Abundance Group project, initiated by Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) will allow schools rated very good and outstanding the option of a differentiated inspection based on self-evaluation, allowing them to focus their resources on giving back to other schools.

This marks the first time an education regulator in the UAE has offered schools a choice to carry out self-evaluations instead of formal inspections in order to help improve standards across other poor performing schools.”

Analysis For The UK

It is noteworthy that at this point this is only for high achieving schools and whether this is a recognition of the importance of uniform assessment is beneficial in providing a pathway to measuring and improving pupil performance.

The Dubai Initiative is an interesting case study and I am sure people across the education system will be watching to see how this change affects performance.

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.

School Assessments A Review Of 2015

January 22, 2016 / admin / 0 Comments

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 / 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.

Exhibiting at The National Jewish Education Conference For Primary School Teachers

January 8, 2016 / admin / 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 12^th 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 12^th and hope that if you are attending you will come and ask us about the School Reporting Suite.

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.

School Reporting Suite

Saving Teachers Time