For primary teachers - how well can you track your students' progress

[jvgugdj]

My first born has just started primary and I was wondering from other teachers out there - how well can reception/primary teachers track and know how well their students are doing? I've been teaching for two decades but in HE so my groups are never bigger than 15 and honestly anything higher than 20 and I do lose track of them. So how is it in primary with 30kids? To me it sounds like such an impossible task. Clearly I cant ask my child's teacher but I was really curious from a teacher's point of view - do you actually know how well each of the individual kid is doing, how their school life is developing etc?

Bump

Well, yes. That's our job. We are with children six hours a day so do get to know them quite well. Some assessments are obviously subjective and will be based on experience, others are objective- demonstrating they meet specific criteria. There will always be the children who hide their lights under a bushel and surprise you each year but generally most teachers have a good grip on expectations and can assess against them.

Yeah, unlike HE, you spend the whole day with the same group of children. I'm a KS2 TA and could tell you loads about each child in my class, including roughly where they are for maths, reading and writing. I can tell you who the left handers are (useful to think about for seating plans). I can tell you who usually picks up each child, which child lives with mum one week and dad the next (and whose week it is at any given time), who has packed lunches and who has school dinners, who likes to play football at playtime, who reads regularly at home etc. I also do the phonics assessments for LKS2 and if you give me a name in one of those six classes, I can tell you if they're in phonics or not, and if they're not in phonics, roughly when they finished phonics.

It takes a while each year to get to know all this stuff, but by this point in the year, I'd expect your child's teacher to have a pretty good picture of them (and all their classmates too).