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?

Teachers are leaving the profession in their droves. No, your need for a few extra words about your child is not a reasonable ask. I teach around 510 pupils. You would like me to write 1020 paragraphs a year so that you could - what? What does this give you that would justify that extra work and take away from time actually spent teaching your child?

I was a primary school teacher in the 1970s under Labour. (Labour didn't seem to be better than today's Conservative government). Worked in leaky portacabins some years. 37 children aged 6 - 8 years. No TA ever in any school i worked in. Spent holidays and evenings devising and making work cards for maths and English etc and covering them in sticky back plastic (a form of hell...). No discipline problems because the threat of a quick tap on the backside for bad behaviour seemed to be a brilliant deterrent (I only needed to do this a couple of times). I wouldn't swap places with any teacher today and can completely understand why they are leaving in droves.

It's a shame that the teachers can't do a full report at the end of the school year as their workload will be lighter with the year 11s and 13s being off

Aside from the obvious - few schools in the big scheme of things have Year 13, not all teachers have exam classes - gained time is frequently used by schools to reduce the (ever increasing) supply bill. It's also used to review how the year has gone, tweak or even re-work schemes of work, manage changes in exam specs to ensure new question styles or teaching points are included in schemes of work, plan departmental activities for the coming year, refresh displays etc etc.

What gained time isn't is time teachers spend twiddling their thumbs and need extra activities to fill it.

Do you really think novels get printed without a check? Newspaper articles? Typos happen. Distraction happens, or concentration lapses that lead to errors. Even good spellers have blind spots.
But teachers have to be perfect? Madness.

I didn't know secondary schools didn't - DS's school sent us a full written report with a paragraph on every subject right throughout his time in school. With so little contact with teachers at second level I would've thought reports are pretty important.

Or all trips are now put to the end of the year so teachers have to plan and then lead them in “gained time”. Gained time no longer exists.

with so little contact with teachers

This is what I'm talking about. Parents have instant access to so much information about their child at secondary school these days. They can usually even see what they've bought for lunch.

But because it isn't in a narrative form people discount it. Attendance, behaviour, detentions, housepoints. Those tracking reports with behaviour, homework, effort, grades. Kids don't even have to record homework anymore, it's all put online. All entered by a teacher.

I had a parent tell me at parents' evening last week that I hadn't given Bob any revision materials.
So I showed her the folder on Teams called "revision" containing subfolders for each section of each exam.
And the multiple revision assignments I've set up that Teams shows me he's not looked at.
And I emailed her the documents which he's had in his books for weeks which tell him where his gaps are.
One of the targets I wrote on his report in January was to "use the materials provided to support your revision".
I assume neither of them read that either.

But can parents not keep an eye on test results throughout the year? Cast an eye over the homework from time to time? And then bring that up with a teacher if there are concerns, rather than them having to produce what is probably an unnecessary report in a lot of cases.

What the falling birth rate could (and should) mean is smaller classes. Keep funding the same so schools can keep teachers and use the better teacher:pupil ratios to deliver better, more personalised education without burning out the staff.
It won’t though.

A report a week before Parents’ Evening is a spectacularly bad waste of time. The teacher writes it. You (ideally) read it. You come to PEve. The teacher says the same as they wrote in the report. Get rid of one or the other - and the report takes the most time.

You could look at what they are doing online. Is the work marked, hopefully it is and you could look at that. If your child can access it then surely you can.

It must be so frustrating, Some people really do want spoonfeeding.

I agree that communication is key.
But when does the teacher have time to produce this communication?

Teachers have back 2 back lessons, after school meeting, unpaid lunches, after school clubs, CPD, planning, preparation and assessment, meetings with SENDCO. email after email, and it goes on.

And in to this those parents that complain when they send an email out at 9pm and complain when they don't get an immediate response. Those that complain that their child has another detention for doing "nothing".

And now you want teachers to provide a never ending open line of communication so that reports don't come as a surprise.

It's a shame that the teachers can't do a full report at the end of the school year as their workload will be lighter with the year 11s and 13s being off

Not all teachers teach Y11 and Y13 every year. Also, during any gained time we have lots of curriculum planning etc to do for the following year. Besides, as many posters have pointed out, narrative reports are not necessarily the most helpful format to inform progress.

And the real issue is that you can't send the first because it would upset the parents and pupil. And the SLT might have to actually tackle the problem.

And you can't send the second because it makes the school look bad and the SLT might have to deal with the problem.

My son is at 6th form, I received a progress report that had his grades and target grades and then I received an email from his form tutor with feedback from herself and his three subject teachers which I found really useful.
My year 9 child received a progress report she scored grade 9 in one subject with a target grade of 5 but the effort score she received was an = which means “does what is expected”… how much more do they expect from her if she is working way above the target grade? I feel computer generated marks like these are very damaging and would like to see the human touch put back into school reports but it would be a huge task for teachers at secondary school.

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.

We don't havd time for more regular communication than we already give. Students get regular communication about their behaviour and progress from us, and parents (at my school) get 2 or 3 progress reports per year (which give the last 3 assessment results, an 'attitude to learning' grade and predicted grades if they are in KS4 or 6th form, plus one parents' evening. If parents want to know more than that, they should ask their kids and look at their work.

You can look at the homework they're currently doing but nothing else is accessible online. They aren't given a great deal of homework either, possibly as they have long days, starting at 8.10am. As I've said, I've asked the school about all of this and I've been advised by then, that parents do not have access to specific grades and marks so no, surely I can't.

It must be so frustrating, Some people really do want spoonfeeding
It's infuriating to be honest.

I always did something similar to MrsHamlet and without fail some parents would as me what I'm doing about their child's poor attainment.

It turns out that despite all the information given to parents in interim reports, all the materials I put on the homework platform (which parents could access), the phone calls about missing homework or concerns, the letters inviting students to revision sessions or intervention days, and all the comments given to the student in my marking, the parent was still annoyed that their child has no idea what they need to work on and they had no idea their child wasn't working hard.

What used to annoy me was how many would expect me to provide 1-1 catch up for their child when their child wasn't even meeting bare minimum expectations.

By not having to do reports lower down, teachers can focus on giving feedback to important years like 6th form. It wouldn’t be feasible to give the y9 students the same amount of feedback. 6th form classes can be less than 20 students. I have 63 year 9 students. If it was get rid of both, or prioritise one, it would be preferable that exam years are prioritised.

That's ridiculous - its not about a never ending line of communication.

We regularly have posters on here claiming to be teachers who complain about lack of support and engagement from parents. Decent and proactive communication can reduce the overall workload and trigger that parental help.

In a climate where many schools don't even allow kids to take exercise books home where do parents get information on their child's progress? Not all schools have information held on line for parents and some that do have no explanation of what the feedback means in the system.
How do such parents help the school by keeping on top of their child's progress and spotting the kind of low level drift which isn't obvious from home? Children who are slightly struggling are not going to photograph the the comments saying "needs improvement" to show their parents.

They are given their marks in class not some computer generated mark. Yes my DC tell me their marks, especially as every 3 months they have another round of testing for every subject, but that isn't the same as being able to see things work yourself or at least a summary of the work to see what the mark is based off of.

That's shocking to say teachers need senior leaders to check their spelling and punctuation!
If a teacher can't correctly write should they even be teaching?

I don’t know what other schools use, but my kids’ school uses edulink. On there I can see their reports with their effort/behaviour/grades etc and I can also see when they’ve been given behaviour points for good or bad behaviour. So I could see instantly if they were misbehaving, and I could see from their reports if they were struggling.