School report - to think this is a bit crap

[SlipperyLizard]

DD (year 7) got her end of term report, showing effort scores and (for the first time) a progress score. All subjects meeting or slightly above “expected” progress, but one subject was “below”. She had a test in this subject a couple of weeks ago and got 44/50.

I emailed teacher so I could get feedback on what DD needed to work on to be meeting expectations. Got told there was nothing to worry about as the report had been written before the recent test, and so progress was based on a test done in September (I.e. just after starting secondary when they did baseline knowledge tests).

AIBU to think the teacher could have based the progress mark on class & homework done since September, even if they couldn’t (for whatever reason) update the report to take the recent test into account?

Feels like teacher has just phoned it in.

Right, so current yr7 humanities is dire. The worst I have ever had a year group come in at.

It's not their fault, they had 2 years with virtually no humanities through covid: it was all English and Maths when it was online teaching.

They will catch up (hopefully) but honestly, they're on the same position as the vast majority of kids their age.

We've found the same in all the non core subjects. Current year7 had a raw deal through covid. It'll come good, just trust the process!

Are you sure she didn’t mean the progress mark was based on progress since that test? Even the way you have written it reads that way to Me

It depends on school criteria. In our school the grades used to take into account homework and class work as well as tests. But some parents then viewed report grades as predictions and complained if their DCs scored lower in tests. After that, the school stopped including schoolwork and homework marks in reports.

I think your DD will understand if you explain to her that the teacher is happy with her progress now.

Progress grades in Year 7 are meaningless anyway. The school is constrained to measure them in a non very rigorous way - in your case it's that they have to base them on particular tests; in other schools/years they are based on SATS and flightpaths. My DD spent the whole of KS3 working "below expectations" in arts and humanities because her "computer generated progress" required her to be getting virtually 100% in everything to get as high as "meeting expectations".

My suggestion would be to ignore them and focus on the effort and attitude type grades/comments.

[quote Queuing4Fergs]@Mummy1608 it is not "helicoptery" to query something about your child's progress at school and to want to engage with the school on it. I hope to Christ you're not a teacher at my children's school. In fact I suggest you resign from the profession altogether as you clearly have nothing but contempt for the parents of the students you teach [/quote]
This. At least the parent gives enough of a shit to query their child not meeting expectations so they can help them 🤨

Year 7 parents can be particularly helicoptery

Year 7 teachers can be really up themselves and full of self importance.

Teachers tend to base grades on proper tests done in proper test conditions, because it gives parents less to argue about. If we use our professional judgement, then we just get hammered by parents asking us to PROVE the grades.

FWIW most reports these days are pointless, vague, beige platitudes, because teachers can't face dealing with the backlash from parents if anyone says anything remotely negative about their little darlings.

@BoredZelda

Year 7 parents can be particularly helicoptery

Year 7 teachers can be really up themselves and full of self importance.

There's no such thing as a year 7 teacher

As pps have said, in a secondary of several hundred pupils the report would have been submitted by the teacher weeks ago. There won't be a mechanism for teachers changing the odd individual grade based on a test a few days before publication - it would be chaos.

[quote Queuing4Fergs]@Mummy1608 it is not "helicoptery" to query something about your child's progress at school and to want to engage with the school on it. I hope to Christ you're not a teacher at my children's school. In fact I suggest you resign from the profession altogether as you clearly have nothing but contempt for the parents of the students you teach [/quote]
Secondary teachers each teach something in the region of 200-300 students. We spend many hours writing reports. If even 5% of those parents wanted some "quick" extra clarification /feedback, and we gave them each 10 minutes, that would be another 2.5 hours, of just repeating ourselves!!

Yabu to describe a teacher who has helped your child make good progress as phoning it in.

@Everydaydayisaschoolday

I was a manager in a very large secondary school responsible for managing the roll out of digital school reports rather than the old style handwritten ones. For every 3 or 4 teachers who know their students well and take the trouble to give accurate assessments of their work and progress there will be 1 who just dialled it in.

The school graded every student A-E on Effort, Achievement and Behaviour in every subject. A meant absolute perfection. E meant they're was a massive problem and the school should have already have been in touch with the parents. One teacher (who had been there since my husband attended the same school 35 years before) would flood fill the spread sheets for every single student he taught with Cs in every category. He would then go through and downgrade a few bad apples that he particularly disliked to DS (Not Es because that would have required him contacting the parents). He was an extreme example but he wasn't alone in treating completing reports very casually.

I cherish the memory of the English teacher who commented on one student that "He is very carless with his spelling and should profread his work before submittin it'.

Yes some teachers deffo do this!

@SlipperyLizard

DD (year 7) got her end of term report, showing effort scores and (for the first time) a progress score. All subjects meeting or slightly above “expected” progress, but one subject was “below”. She had a test in this subject a couple of weeks ago and got 44/50.

I emailed teacher so I could get feedback on what DD needed to work on to be meeting expectations. Got told there was nothing to worry about as the report had been written before the recent test, and so progress was based on a test done in September (I.e. just after starting secondary when they did baseline knowledge tests).

AIBU to think the teacher could have based the progress mark on class & homework done since September, even if they couldn’t (for whatever reason) update the report to take the recent test into account?

Feels like teacher has just phoned it in.

I'm a senior teacher. Maybe ask about the school and dept assessment policy. I would expect every subject to have done 2 assessments by now. Assessment don't have to be at start or end of terms. We slot our assessments in around report dates so we are just marking one before they get their reports. We use these to inform their report.

I would have an issue with this as a senior member of staff so it's worth asking about the assessment policy. The only circumstances where it might be acceptable is if there is a change in teacher close to the report window or in a marginalised subject with less timetable time so they don't know the children as well. I'd still expect there to have been an assessment since September though!

To be honest it sounds like she has done an assessment if she's done a test out of 50 so it's BS and they should be able to translate that into a progress grade.

Most school reports are pointless these days. They don't tell you anything meaningful, and, as is the case here, often completely out of date already.

Problem for the teacher is that even though they can see progress through communication in class or homework or whatever, if there isn’t clear, measurable evidence of it then (according to the government) it didn’t happen.

You got a decent enough response when you asked the teacher directly. Yabu to expect her to amend every students test scores at the last minute for their reports.

@Stevenage689

Yabu to describe a teacher who has helped your child make good progress as phoning it in.

Phoning in the report, not teaching generally

@Sirzy

Are you sure she didn’t mean the progress mark was based on progress since that test? Even the way you have written it reads that way to Me

She said the “progress” score was “based on” the assessment in September.

She did better in one test that hadn't been seen when the report was done. I would stop flapping and making a fuss.

@FairyCakeWings

Problem for the teacher is that even though they can see progress through communication in class or homework or whatever, if there isn’t clear, measurable evidence of it then (according to the government) it didn’t happen.

You got a decent enough response when you asked the teacher directly. Yabu to expect her to amend every students test scores at the last minute for their reports.

I’m not expecting the teacher to amend it for the recent test, if that’s after the cut off, I’m expecting it not to be entirely based on a test done in the first few weeks of high school on children who had disrupted years of primary due to covid and vastly inadequate teaching of humanities as a result.

She’s taught my daughter for 2 terms, has seen class work, homework etc. If the progress mark is meaningless due to being 2 terms out of date then perhaps school need to not give it until a test has been completed?

@cansu

She did better in one test that hadn't been seen when the report was done. I would stop flapping and making a fuss.

I didn’t “make a fuss”, I emailed the teacher to ask for feedback as to how we could support DD to improve.

I didn’t want DD to be confused that she was “below” expectations when she’s just got highly praised for her test mark!

I'm a primary teacher and DH is a secondary teacher. Neither of us can work out why schools would write reports before the assessments are done. In both our schools, the most recent assessments form the reports.

However, your DC's school is an improvement on mine. I had to query why her report came home with an assessment grade of 0 when she had had the marked test back in class with over 90%. Apparently they had mixed her up with another child and sent this incorrect information out on her formal report!

I would ignore the report completely . A few years back when my daughter was at school she stopped going in the first term in yr 8 due to ill health , she was still on the roll but never went as had a tutor at home we received reports with marks from 80-90% of the subjects for at least 2 terms after she stopped going completely .

@Everydaydayisaschoolday

I was a manager in a very large secondary school responsible for managing the roll out of digital school reports rather than the old style handwritten ones. For every 3 or 4 teachers who know their students well and take the trouble to give accurate assessments of their work and progress there will be 1 who just dialled it in.

The school graded every student A-E on Effort, Achievement and Behaviour in every subject. A meant absolute perfection. E meant they're was a massive problem and the school should have already have been in touch with the parents. One teacher (who had been there since my husband attended the same school 35 years before) would flood fill the spread sheets for every single student he taught with Cs in every category. He would then go through and downgrade a few bad apples that he particularly disliked to DS (Not Es because that would have required him contacting the parents). He was an extreme example but he wasn't alone in treating completing reports very casually.

I cherish the memory of the English teacher who commented on one student that "He is very carless with his spelling and should profread his work before submittin it'.

Indeed.

DD only ever got C (average) for attainment in computer science, which initially we put down to the poor teacher having to come up with grades for 600 kids he'd been teaching for less than two months. However it never changed, and since she was A in most other subjects it didn't exactly encourage her to take it for GCSE.

Now in year 11, as far as we can tell, nobody is predicted a 9 for one of the sciences - we're not sure if that's because the lazy science teacher can't be bothered, or because the lazy teacher is worse than we thought and none of them are going to get 9s.

When we first had attainment/effort grades in one school I taught in, we decided that as the scale was 1-5 for attainment, and we had five sets, our starting point would be the set number, although we might vary it for kids at the top/bottom of those sets. Other subjects, however, seemed to work with a scale of 1-3, using 4 and 5 only for a handful of kids, so we got complaints we were being negative. Somebody needed to clarify the policy!

@lanthanum

We never target 9s we have to get students to teach their targets, 9s we're supposed to be the absolute best in the country, like top 10-20% of all students in the country so our policy was not to target it as we thought it would be close to 100%
It's not turned out that way but we still don't target 9s. As an individual teacher I have absolutely said to students that they will be getting a 9. I think it's a stupid policy but it might be a common one.

[quote robocracker]@lanthanum

We never target 9s we have to get students to teach their targets, 9s we're supposed to be the absolute best in the country, like top 10-20% of all students in the country so our policy was not to target it as we thought it would be close to 100%
It's not turned out that way but we still don't target 9s. As an individual teacher I have absolutely said to students that they will be getting a 9. I think it's a stupid policy but it might be a common one.[/quote]
I entirely agree that 9s should not be given as targets. I have actually been arguing about this with DD's school as several of her "minimum target grades" are 9, although plenty of teachers wouldn't predict 9s before year 11, so she's been "below target" on most reports. A target of 8+ seems far more appropriate.

I know that there is some disagreement amongst teachers at DD's school about how soon it is reasonable to give 9 as a prediction, and I quite agree with that (and some subjects are easier to predict than others). However we're now on the last set of predictions, and the other science teachers have been predicting 9s since the autumn, so either this teacher is out of step with the other science teachers, or DD is opting to study her worst science at A-level.