Thank you to all those parents who attended parent consultation meetings over the last two weeks to find out how well your children are learning at school. 

In February I wrote to you to let you know that School Pupil Tracker is closing and that from next year we will be changing the way we assess your child's learning and how we share this information with you. We have reviewed the ways we will assess and record your child's progress from September. 

 

While considering our new assessment arrangements we have ensured that they will:

• show which children are on track and making progress and those who aren't
• inform teaching
• enable us to report progress to parents

In line with Ofsted and the DfE we have also considered teacher workload in order to prevent 'burn-out' and to retain our highly talented staff team. 

 

We will be moving to two assessment points in the school year. At the beginning of the spring term and at the end of the summer term. We will move to use NFER tests for reading and mathematics, these will provide us with a standardised score and detailed gap analysis to tell us how much progress your child is making and if they are on  track to meet National Curriculum expectations for their age range.  The tests will also to inform our next steps in teaching. We will continue to use teacher assessment for writing, and in Early Years. Children's  reading ability will be 'Benchmarked' termly to ensure a good match of reading book to ability. 

Children in Years 1, 2 and 6 will continue to sit the statutory assessments in the summer term  and Year 4 pupils will sit the new national times table check, again in the summer term. 

We will re-align our parent meetings to the new assessment points and continue to send books home so that you can share your child's progress with them.

This will look like:

• Autumn 1, meet the teacher parent meetings
• Autumn 2, books sent home
• Spring 1, Y1 -6 NFER tests in maths and reading and parent consultation meetings
• Spring 2, books sent home
• Summer 1, books sent home (statutory assessments, Y2 and 6)
• Summer 2, NFER tests (Y1,3,4,5), annual report to parents

 

We are in final talks with our preferred provider for a new software system which will hold all of our assessment information, once that is finalised I will share more information with you.

In the meantime we will continue to use SPTO this term and to publish annual reports in July. If you wish to keep any information that is currently stored on SPTO beyond that, then you will need to download it before the end of December.