To think secondary students should get written school reports

[Giovannimilanese]

When I say ‘written’ I mean typed out, not necessarily hand written

I was going through my own old school reports from the 80s/90s recently. Twice a year there was a full written report with a paragraph from every subject teacher. I found it really interesting to read the observations and to see the way some of the teachers noticed skills/talents and weaknesses that I personally only became fully aware of much later.

My own dc have attended a mix of state/private schools. The Indies still provide decent reports with detail but my youngest is in Yr8 at the local state secondary and hasn’t had any written reports. Apparently they have stopped doing them. Twice a year they get a basic list with a number from 1 to 5 for behaviour, homework etc and once a year a grade - ‘Mastering’, ‘Securing’ etc

The only organised contact with teachers is a zoom parents meeting once a year, 5 minutes with each teacher. Is this normal?

I appreciate that writing reports must add significantly to teachers’ workloads & I’m sympathetic about that. I’ve also noticed (including at private schools) that the comments sometimes seem heavily cut & pasted anyway.

But I think the personalised feedback can be incredibly useful, both now and for reflecting back on in the future, and think it’s a shame if this is no longer the standard…

AIBU?

Oh and if I had any doubts at Y8, I would never leave anything until Y10/11 especially something like English or Maths which are mandatory. If you are able to spare the resource (be it time or money for tutors/ learning materials) I would always do it earlier rather than later, before any significant deficit of learning has built up.

We do get them - proper full paragraph for each subject (big state school). Obviously there is a lot of cutting and pasting and some teachers are better than others at making that less clunky, but I understand why. Teachers are massively overworked. I don’t think I’d mind that much not having them, as long as I could trust the school to talk to me about any problems.

Research has shown that most parents don’t want a long worded, detailed report but just want clear indicators of progress, effort and achievement. My mindset is that nothing in a report should come as a surprise and any issues or concerns should be mentioned when they occur either by email, phone call or on our online portal.
I find parents evenings much more useful as having a face to face discussion is more productive and allows me to focus on key areas. Unfortunately, not all parents attend and that is their prerogative (I offer phone calls if parents want to attend but are unable - not many take me up on this).
There are much more demands on teacher’s time nowadays than even 10 years ago so we have to adapt and make feedback more effective.

My mindset is that nothing in a report should come as a surprise and any issues or concerns should be mentioned when they occur either by email, phone call or on our online portal.

And people wonder why teachers have a higher workload than in previous years.

In previous years the report was the telling parents that their kid had an issue with homework or focus or whatever. Now the expectation is that the report has nothing new in it....which makes one wonder what the point of the report is.

You see it come up on MN a lot about parents' evenings too. Nothing at parents' evening should be a surprise.

All this suggests that parents are getting way more information about their kid than they used to (online tracking systems for attendance by lesson, behaviour points, housepoints, detentions etc even before you get to the expectation of regular phone calls and emails home) and yet they think they're getting less if they don't get a written paragraph.

What has changed is the time that teachers have available - over the years PPA time has been chipped away at and we now get approximately 50 mins a week to do all our planning, marking, assessments, paperwork etc etc. Which is why most teachers are using every evening and weekend just to keep up.

In my school (state secondary), we only do written reports for year 13, which I teach 40 pupils for (Maths) and it took me over six hours to write all of their personalised reports, and I am quite proficient at report writing, having taught for over 16 years and teaching A level Maths for the majority of that. My newer colleagues can easily spend 10+ hours on a set of written reports. If I had to do that for every class I teach, it would take me weeks to do. As a full time Maths teacher, you teach approx 200+ pupils (seeing each class approx 3 or 4 times a week). Other subject teachers would teach significantly more as they only see classes once a week so therefore have more classes. It is simply unmanageable.

If we were given more non-contact, non-teaching time within the school day, we would be more than happy to write reports but unless that happens it’s simply unrealistic.

We get them at least twice a year at my children’s secondary school. We do only get assessment results and class and year percentage so we can compare but it’s better than nothing.

My children loved seeing my old reports. Back in the day when teachers were honest and your class position was listed 😃

The point is about communication.

If there is regular communication and feedback then nothing in the report should be a shock but the report itself is part of that process.

There is a great deal of evidence that engaged and supportive parents are a key indicator of a child's success. Its very difficult to be an engaged and supportive parent without regular meaningful information which parents can understand and use to take any appropriate action.

Don't parents know what their children are doing? If there are serious behaviour problems they will be contacted, if you look at their books and see the marks and comments you can see what they are doing.

I've got 4 children, all adults now and don't think I was ever told anything in a report or parents evening that I didn't already know.

Agreed descriptive reports instead of numbers would be more useful. I must say however that my DCs school are very good at calling parents about every 6 weeks just with a quick progress update and to ask for there's anything you'd like to know and they will then refer to a specific teacher and email you a little summary.

Parents evening is a nightmare though that I have brought up numerous times to the heads of year. They hold it for all years over 1 evening, no set date just when DC bring letters home to say the date. If you don't get logged into booking system in the first 2 hours you have zero chance of getting a slot for any teacher so I just take it as there is no parents evening anymore, which is terrible.

My children attend a large state secondary school that is in the top 10 in the “ league tables “ .

We get two reports a year - a tracking report in the late autumn that is a chart of numbers for things like progress, effort, homework, behaviour, current grade, target grades, attendance and any lateness.

Then there is a full report in the Spring which has all of the above plus a narrative on the course and the pupil, their strengths and what they need to improve.

A few weeks later there is a parents evenings with face to face appointments with every teacher that the parent wishes to see. You can also meet with your child’s guidance teacher, the head of year and learning support ( if applicable ).

We can contact any teacher ( via the school office ) at any time to discuss any concerns we have - on the phone or in person. Teachers will also call or email a parent.

I appreciate this takes a lot of time for the teachers, but the vast majority of parents at our school want to work with the school to support their child, and to do that we need information and open channels of communication.

Ive found almost all of my children’s teachers to be very good or excellent and overall I’m very happy with the school and the education and support my children have received.

Mine don't really have books they bring home. Most books are kept at school as standard (English Lit seems to be the exception) homework is all online. I've asked the school for a means to check grades etc, just on case there's anything that could be improved that we could help with at home. I'm told it's not the standard practice to do this across the academy trust and they don't have the means to do this.

Secondary RE/History teacher
Here’s an insight into my workload.
I have to plan every RE lesson I teach from scratch. Some are already planned from last year, but I will still need to adjust these to fit this year’s cohort. I then need to adapt the lesson for each individual class to meet SEN/general learning needs.
I then need to adapt the History lessons that are planned by colleagues to fit my style and classes. As a non-specialist I also often have to spend a considerable time on subject knowledge to make sure I am confident in the topic I am teaching (contrary to popular belief teachers cannot know everything about everything so we have to spend time learning ourselves).
Most of the resources I use, I create myself.
Each set of books takes around 30 minutes to mark. I teach 25 different classes. And books are marked every few weeks. We also have termly assessments that take around an hour per set to mark.
One day I spend an hour after school running a club.
One day a week we have an hour long staff meeting after school. We also have 3 meetings a week before school starts.
I teach for all but 2 lessons every week.
If there are any behaviour concerns/attainment issues I phone parents after school and sometimes attend meetings with parents.
I am required to contribute to reports into the progress of any students who are looked after/have an EHCP/need exam concessions etc
If I have concerns about students I need to complete a report and often seek out the member of staff who deals with it.
My break times are often spent speaking to students about homework/revision/general life concerns or discussing work related issues with colleagues, if I’m lucky, leaving me enough time to run to the loo after printing my resources for my upcoming lessons.
I have to complete data reports for all of my classes once a term.
I create revision resources for my Year 10 class as well as preparing and setting homework for all classes.
I don’t currently teach year 11, but if I did, in addition to this, I would also be running after school revision sessions and holiday revision days.
There are also 5 parents evenings each year, an open evening and 2 lunch times each week when I am on duty supervising students.

Sorry if we’re not working hard enough for you 🤷‍♀️

We write them (state sixth form). I know a lot of people largely cut and paste and totally appreciate why, but something is lost certainly.

This nails it on the head! Very relatable. Im a HoD and have been teaching 27 years. I'm probably not as professional, as I'm not doing any marking today but will do tomorrow, I miss deadlines for some things as I ‘triage’. I never turn away kids or parents needing help and support so I'm often late with performance management appraisal or updating an overview of our curriculum map (again). I'd love it to be like it was for the kids in the olden days!

I think the issue of parents wanting to be helpful is largely a separate one from written reports.

Even when there were written reports they didn't really contain enough information for parents to help. When I first started teaching reception sent home reports at the end of the year assessing the children against the early learning goals. The reports were about six pages long and full of jargon the parents didn't understand.

Much more useful for parents was what was done a bit later, an email saying something like topic of the week is the three little pigs and we are learning the letter R.

I've worked across primary, secondary and sixth form. Primary tend to keep parents much more informed, often via newsletters etc, and encourage parents to help at home with reading and maths.

As the kids get older it's harder for even the best informed parent to help. My DD did Latin. I know no Latin at all. The only help I could potentially have offered was getting a tutor, if needed.

At secondary, many schools have online platforms. Parents are informed of detentions, attendance and homework automatically via their log in on the online platform.

Certainly in my last year of teaching, we set all homeworks via Teams, and when we got parents saying "my child has not been set any homework" it was really easy to just log in and show them all the homeworks that had been set.

We did for a while have a system that automatically emailed parents if homeworks were late but as it is the same kids that never do homeworks it was the same parents being deluged with emails and they begged us to stop. They mostly knew their kids did no work anyway.

The other thing is that over the years, reports have become so prescriptive that they're hardly worth writing anyway. I had to write them by hand when I first started teaching. Took hours and hours.
My kids used to get pages and pages from primary school, but only 1 sentence not from a statement bank.

Lengthy written reports are pointless. If I have issues with a kid, I'll phone long before a report goes home. Kids often have behaviour points every day, which gives a much more up to date impression. Sometimes reports would be written a month or so before they actually got sent home.

My dc get a record of attitude and attainment. Works for me. Ds is a lazy but bright, who likes to answer in class; dd is a little miss perfect (for now). Neither of which comes as a surprise to me, so it would be a total waste of their teachers' time to write it.

y7 to 10 get two progress reviews (target, expected, attitude to learning grades), a parents' evening, and a report written by the form tutor based on comments from subject teachers.

Y11-13 get two progress reviews, a parents' evening and a subject report.

More usefully, they get feedback on their work In their lessons and in their books.

We don’t do written reports. I’ve got around 170 students who I see each week, there’s no way I’d be able to do a written report for each one. I can say so much more in the 5 mins appointment slots. I also don’t think they’re looked at much and absorbed when sending home a report of ten different subjects. OP even said that some of it didn’t make sense til looking at it as an adult, so it served no purpose at the time.

Just adding more info: we do send out grades each term. This will give a grade they’re working at, a mark for behaviour, homework and effort. The marks are out of 5. But there aren’t personalised comments. Parents can look at the grades and get in touch if they have any concerns.

I think it's just too much work for already overstretched teachers. Yes, written reports are nice to have but think how many each teacher would have to produce - 5 minutes for each pupil in a class of 30 is two and a half hours! I actually think short, hand-written comments on a 'report card' would have been quicker to produce than logging into computer systems, saving and sharing.

I feel sorry for teachers. Reports used to be refreshingly honest, and would tell a parent if a child was messing around or not concentrating, or generally being a pita. But these days teachers would face abuse from a critical mass of parents for being candid, as there seems to be a movement of people for whom no one is allowed to criticise their child. So while I’d like a more frequent and more candid written report I can see why the teachers don’t want to do this.

Considering the amount of time teachers currently spend doing unpaid work at home, I absolutely think YABU for expecting them to then write a full paragraph for every single student they teach - at secondary it could be hundreds!

YABU. Make the effort to go to Parents' Evening and you'll get much more feedback than you would do in a written paragraph.

Life has changed since the 80/90s. If you want reports to return to how they were then, you'll also be getting a ranking for your child in each class. All very well if your child is 3/32. Very demoralising if your kid is 32/32.

Teacher unions have fought hard to remove this onerous task. Schools are struggling to recruit at all. Many vacancies are being readvertised 3 or 4 times. Teacher training courses are reporting having 8 trainees as opposed to 24 in a cohort just a few years ago.

I’m a teacher and taking the reports workload off us is amazing. I used to spend about an additional 10 hours per class writing really meaningful and carefully composed reports. A lot of teachers didn’t and I used to proofread and send back the inadequate reports

I actually think a proper and full report is useful and whilst I don’t miss the additional work I do (weirdly) miss writing lovely things about the fabulous students I teach.

My school does additional parents’ evenings for the exam classes but for KS3 it’s only one. The pupils do get a termly achievement and progress report with a tutor report and obviously parents can contact us anytime they want for additional feedback.