School refusing access to exam results

This! ⬆️ Primary School kids do a billion tests (NOT exams!) a year & unless anything is of concern, parents are none the wiser & don’t need to be! That’s the very job of the school - educating, assessing, re-evaluating, plugging identified gaps, educating some more……..etc etc etc

Do you have a “neat handwriting girl”?

If so, be prepared for every report to be the same and unless she has a significant problem or causes a significant problem the report won’t change. Being the annoying parent in some cases is the only way to get any more information - I never cared about being the annoying parent if it was necessary to address a problem which was being overlooked because my child wasn’t a “problem”.

There is no reason why schools can’t be transparent about tests and results. I think labelling a child with special needs and under performer because they were required to do the test on an inaccessible medium is appalling. I’d be wanting to know how this was being recorded and where it was kept and for how long and I’d be happy to support the school lobbying for better testing protocols if paper tests for children with disabilities is mandated centrally.

I made sure they were being challenged appropriately. And where school didn't have the resources to offer that, we did so out of school.

There will always be crappy parents who can't do maths and who tell their kids maths isn't important. But if their peers tell them maths IS and they want to break the cycle then invested parents and a school aiming for excellence because the parents expect it, then they can improve themselves without parental input.

State school educated here. Neither parent went to University albeit they wanted us to do well. I'm post graduate educated. At some point the cycle breaks.

@JustMarriedBecca but involved parents with the resources and time won’t close the education gap. There are children now in state who do as well as those in private education. What did you do with your knowledge of the test results if you didn’t tell your DC? Or make them do extra work?

18% of the population are functionally illiterate, so they won’t have the ability to help their DC. Them seeing test papers wouldn’t help their DC’s education.

Many people in England seem proud of the fact they can’t do maths and then tell their DC of the fact and so the issue continues. Those parents seeing the maths papers aren’t going to help. They won’t or can’t help show a different method for learning fractions. During COVID when homeschooling was happening it was very obvious that the maths schooling took a massive backseat in Primary level, with many parents not even trying to engage with it.

Being interested in your child’s education is important, and the best thing you can do is tell your child that education is important, be engaged and to respect your teacher. It’s the attitude towards education that will help reduce some of the gap.

Seemingly a rare view here.

I have asked and I have always been told these results no problems despite not being a teacher. I'd imagine in Year 2 they are former SATS papers. In Year 3-5 our school used standardised tests (NFER maybe now branded something else)

There is a HUGE difference between your child exceeding with a score of 120 (top 20% nationally) and your child exceeding with a score of 140 (top 1%). If you are always told that your child is exceeding then there is no where to go from that. If your child is top 1% then you want to know they are being challenged. That is not always the case.

I have never seen an actual paper, I only get the results. I feel like it shows school I'm engaged and whilst I'm not on their back, and leave education to them, that I'm going to start to BE involved if necessary. I don't share these results with the children and nor do I make them do extra papers or practice exams.

Schools work hard but should be held accountable for developing each individual child according to his or her need (within the limits of awful resource and funding in the state system). Private schools have high results because of invested parents and accountability (no one is paying £35k a year for an standardised education). Parents with the resources and time to get involved in state education should. That's how to decrease the education gap and improve standards for all.

(DC just smashed their SATS 120/120/120 so I must be doing something right).

But sometimes they need a different method in order to understand it. I remember DD in 5th or 6th grade was completely stuck on one particular maths area, no matter how many times her teacher explained it she just couldn't grasp it. She was doing her homework and I saw that she couldn't do it so I explained it a different way (the way I had learnt it in school in fact) and she finally understood.

As for the benefits of seeing tests, DD coasted through 1st and 2nd grade, all the tests were so easy for her she didn't have to think twice about them but then she got to 3rd grade and started science (1st and 2nd grade pretty much just focused on maths and language) and realised, thanks to a science test that she didn't do so well on, that she couldn't just coast any more and had to start studying. That was the start of an excellent work ethic, that has served her well. I wish I had learnt that lesson in school before I messed up my A Levels.

I input data straight onto our system. I don't input test scores into any school system. I keep the paper with the score written in pen on the front if ever I need to look at it again (which has virtually never happened) and know if the score equates to Working Towards, Expected etc. Knowing your child scored 15/25 isn't much use if you don't know what the grade boundaries are. Frankly it's not that much use even if you do, as 7 year olds aren't robots who produce the expected performance each time.

I just want to mention that this is a year 2 child. We are not talking about exams here.

I should add that I do understand why parents want to see papers and I am happy to speak to anyone to explain anything they don't understand, I just find that assessment results are rarely helpful for parents.

I no longer teach in the UK but we use similar assessments and I try to avoid giving results to parents because A) mid year assessments are done to inform my teaching rather than to grade each child, B) end of year assessments are only part of the story when it comes to giving a grade, and C) parents rarely understand what the grades mean and I end up in multiple meetings having to explain that their child hasn't failed because they didn't get 100%. So many children struggle with the pressure of exams and get questions wrong even though I know they understand the topic. Also, the assessments we use are set so that most children who are meeting expectations will get around 60 - 70%. This allows for us to see who is exceeding expectations or working above their age range - if a child who was meeting could easily achieve 100%, it would be difficult to see who was working at the expected level and who was above, as they'd all have the same score. I find that parents will look at a grade of 65%, for example, and think that their child is doing terribly as they have answered 35% of the questions wrong, but this is not the case. I always state the topics that each child needs to work on in their reports (Isla needs to work on finding fractions of numbers, Bobby would benefit from some additional work on the 7 and 8 times tables...) so that parents know what to work on and I find this is much easier for everyone than just giving them a score or an exam paper.

That is what parents evening is for. These aren’t exams and your kid is in year 2 so think you need to step back a bit. Any problems they would let you know YABU.

@Ivyweb but a number might not tell a parent much. At 7 if you are told your child is at the standard expected at her age, that is good news. If a teacher would like you to do some work on a certain area, and that would usually be through play not workbooks, at home they would let you know. Some Primary schools will include blogs, sections on newsletter letting you know what each year has studied that week, so can always build on those skills.

I wonder if some of it arises from the fact that we aren’t given any numbers anywhere. At least not in my experience. Some parents might prefer a number to a paragraph.

Mind boggling?

They probably don’t want parents trying to teach fractions to their kids as you might use a different method and confuse them. Do age appropriate game type stuff, read books, do puzzles. She’s in Year 2!

But it is a snapshot. The report, discussion at parents evening and books give a much more thorough overview than one number from one test. Why, as a parent, is that number so important that you need staff to explain it to you rather than focus on all of their knowledge of your child?

@Easytoconfuse what would you want? How much time would you want the teacher to be spending on this?

Wouldn't it be better still if parents could have the results in a way that they could understand? The law makes them responsible for their children's education after all.

I rarely have those experience but I work in secondary so parents aren’t frequently in the school outside of parents evening.

Again, whether it is useful or relevant for the OP to see the grades isn’t up to us, it’s her right to see it and also decide what she wants to do with it

@aliceyyyy2654 and as a teacher I bet you will love it when a parent comes armed with the info and saying but it doesn't tell me what I want, what does it actually mean! But yes a school does have to give it, but I cannot see how it will benefit the 7yo

It might well be more useful to have an informal conversation with the teacher on how the OP could support her child.
But until the data is made available to her she won't know and can't make a judgement on it. My point is - the decision about which is more useful is one for her to make, not the school. She can't judge the value of the data until she has a full picture. And there's nothing to suggest she couldn't see the data and also have an informal discussion sometime afterwards. The fact that you, or the school think the data might not be useful is irrelevant - it is for her to make that judgement.
The school should not be attempting to act as a gatekeeper for information the OP has a legal right to request.

that would be up to the OP to decide. I’m simply giving her a method to get those results which is what she was asking for

I’m a teacher and I suggested it. It might not be the best thing for her to do but it is a way to get it 🤷🏻‍♀️

And how does a parent having that information, which won't actually give the detail which would help the OP supplement the child's learning actually help the child?

I don't really see the point in the school being secret squirrel over this - if the OP wants the results give them to her. People do have the internet, they can google what things mean.

But I also agree that it's more useful to do things like visit the library and read books over the summer than swot up on fractions or whatever.