Assertive Mentoring......anyone's school taken this on?

[Ruprekt]

Tell me about it, please.

[Ruprekt]

Bump

[TheRoadLessTravelled]

My kids school has. As far as I can tell its dreadful.

The kids each have a 1:1 with the teacher every half term. Which is very expensive time wise for the teacher. But I don't think these 1:1 sessions are helping my kids at all.

So my kids are missing out on hours of teaching by their class teacher, for what?

Plus they're told they're targets. Which is placing a ceiling on them. Eg DSs writing is well behind his maths. When I told him he needed to work hard at it he said 'but it's green!' Ie he's met his target for the year.

And parents eve are equally stupid. Trying to convince me how well my kids are doing based on targets they've made up - not based on national expectations.

A real step backwards for my kids school I think.

[Ruprekt]

Interesting comments, thank you.

Am not sure how a school of over 600 will be able to do this. Looks like a lot of hard work to me.

[mumtoone]

My children's school does this. I think it works better for ks2 than ks1 as the younger one's aren't really mature enough to fully engage in discussions about targets. It seems to motivate my child in ks2 and it gives some structure to parents evenings.

[Snowdown]

Think our school are doing this - ds has yet to have his time with the teacher but he doesn't seem that keen, says the time put aside is very boring for the rest of the class.

[Ruprekt]

Am sure the plan must be to keep the lesson plan the same and then do one to one sessions separately.

[Ruprekt]

Bump

[partystress]

Just started at my school. Plus points: gives you very specific detail on what the children are lacking to achieve next sub-level; the package includes levelled assessments; children seem to understand the green/yellow/red system almost instantly.

Negatives: lots of photocopying; a lot of time spent testing instead of teaching; we suspect levels are generous and we may be in for disappointments come actual SATs time. Specifically on English: the reading side does not appear to offer anything useful for children above level 3. Writing is v like the Ros Wilson criteria.

Unclear how it can be flexed to support whatever we put in once levels are binned.

We have yet to implement the conversation part... It seems to be proving a bit of a challenge for our leadership team to work out how to timetable it without disrupting lessons.

[jubbablub]

We use it. It's rubbish. Lots of steps. Lots of paper. It's ridiculous.

Things like children who are clearly a level 5 in their maths books can't get a level 5 in the maths tests because of a silly error they made in their last maths test so have to stay as a level 4.

Writing is a nonsense. Way too much emphasis on text features and not enough on being able to use punctuation, a wide range of connectives and sentence types. Meetings are a waste of time for most children.

[Ruprekt]

Will feedback once we start this.........

[TheRoadLessTravelled]

Are you a teacher or parent?

[Ruprekt]

Both.......

[Ruprekt]

Ugh....back to school for a week of crappiness!