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?

In education these days there is a big focus on getting teachers to do things that actually have an impact on the progress of the students.

A bloke called John Hattie a number of years ago wrote a book which tried to work out which, of all the things that teachers do, actually mean that students learn more.

His book was called visible learning, there is a website as well.

visible-learning.org

It was based on large numbers of research studies across the world.

In the U.K., secondary schools are measured on how much progress students make at school -so putting it simply, how much they learn. This is measured at year 11 by how many GCSEs they get.

So schools have used Hattie's visible learning to get teachers to do the things that the evidence says help them learn.

So a lot of schools reduced homework, because the research evidence is that in most subjects it takes up time but does not improve learning (my school kept maths, English and mfl homework).

The evidence also is that written personalised reports at ks3 do not improve progress. So schools have stopped doing them (mostly) and are using the time freed up to do things that make it more likely your child will do better in their GCSEs eg running extra revision sessions, making videos to support your child with particular types of questions etc.

Once your child enters year 11 you will get far more written personalised feedback than you can cope with, believe me!

Far less was expected of teachers when I was at school than now. It's not surprising you'll get different experiences when sending one child state and the others private is it? I always found the grades more useful than the cut and paste jobs we used to get, so I soon got used to it when my kids' school stopped the comments.

Is this because secondary schools are much larger now. There were 80 or 90 children in my own year at school - 3 form entry -

My sons year 7 is 300 pupils!

My youngest is in Year 13 and I've just had his last report. It was online only this year which I presume is a cost saving measure but I've had paper reports every year before this, since my eldest started secondary in 2009. Each year we get one full report and one or two progress reports that are just attainment, target and effort grades.
The written report is definitely individual. I mean obviously there will be some cutting and pasting involved as lots of comments apply to lots of kids, but some of it is very specific eg there's reference to particular errors DS made in his mocks this year. We have certainly always read them and discussed with our DC and have found them useful. I hadn't realised reports weren't the norm any more.

Would I like a written report? Certainly, it would be nice to have.
But what I'd absolutely prioritize over that would be a school full of teachers. Teaching the subject they trained for (or have chosen to switch to).
The education system is broken far beyond what sending out a written report would achieve.

I'm happy to just get grades but I wish the grades were easily understandable - instead we get things like maths: 7.2 with no explanation.

No, it's not quicker because most people are not emailing. Don't assume others are doing what you do.

The number of emails I usually get after a report goes home is 0, because the report tells parents what they need to know.

If we have specific concerns, the report isn't a surprise because we've already contacted home. If someone has particularly excelled, they've gone through our rewards system with certificates, commendations etc.

Sorry it's not sweet or fluffy, but schools are strapped.

I went to secondary school in the 1990s and even then the reports were just from comment banks. Each sentence was selected from a drop down list. Because I was good at all my subjects, my reports were therefore all identical. To be honest, the current system sounds more personalised than 30 years ago, not less, as the targets are at least based on each individual child.

We still get 2 per year. With comments. Electronically through the APP.

School life has changed massively in my ten years as a teacher. I can remember writing reports and rather enjoyed it. It gave me some time to really focus on individual achievement. It is a real shame that there isn’t time anymore. I am going to try to explain what has changed. This is not me being defensive but trying to shine a light on the very real challenges schools are facing.

We have a recruitment and retainment crisis. Funding has not just been cut to the bone but beyond that.

It is not rare for students to have ‘cover’ for more than one lesson a day or for every lesson in one subject for an extended period. This means some classes are being taught by non-specialists and sometimes non-qualified staff. The teachers in those departments have to provide the learning resources for those lessons on top of their own. It was rare for me to cover one lesson a term in my first year but now it is rare that I don’t have a cover lesson in a week.

Cover staff from external agencies cost money that schools don’t have. To reduce this, gain time is often used to cover classes. When I first started in teaching, this would be given to updating schemes of work and to cover transition activities.

Teaching staff are covering more duties due to support staff roles being cut to save money. This takes a chunk out of the directed time budget. School leadership can only assign tasks (direct) staff for a set amount of hours per school year. If these are being used on break duties, detention duties, etc then those hours can’t be assigned to writing reports.

The current reports take less time and they give you a starting point. If my child is doing well in Maths, Science but not achieving targets in English and MFL, then I would contact the English and MFL teachers for some advice. I appreciate you would value more but not all parents do. A report shouldn’t be a surprise - if there is an issue, you should be contacted before a report is due.

I adore the actual teaching element of my job and watching kids grow towards the adults they are becoming as they leave. When I bump into some former pupils, my heart could burst with pride hearing of their successes. I am worried as I watch budgets get cut again and see more talented staff leave. Things are getting worse. I don’t want to leave but I am closer than I’ve ever been to making that decision. I switched to a four day week to stop burnout but it has had little impact.

So it’s a ‘not enough time’ thing more than ‘there is no value in it’ thing? I do understand that and it’s a shame.

It just got to the point where you couldn't say anything remotely personal or interesting so I would just be copy and pasting the learning objectives they had met along with a summary of what we'd been doing that term. It all got very dull.

My children get/got feedback on their work from teachers to act on. It doesn't need to be reproduced in the report. It's worked for my dc as elder did very well in A levels and younger did very well in gcses. A written report for me wouldn't have improved that. We get feedback at parents eve too. On the report there are grades for assessments, behaviour, homework etc.
I'm more concerned about teacher shortages.

Exactly the same as above.

I was at school in the 70s. We got a report book with each subject on a line, and A-C grade (based on no data at all) and a comment like "Excellent", "Average", "No effort" and so on. I still have mine.

Trust me - they told you absolutely nothing.

One of the reasons I left teaching was that it was becoming less and less about the individual. I can see why it happens. Way too much pressure on teachers to prove what they've done. Less scope for any individuality.
I now do tuition. The parent of a Y11 pupil sent me his Y10 report just as he started. It's a copy paste report. It looks quite lengthy. 50% of that is the content of the syllabus. Do parents need this? The rest of it says he's a nice kid who works quite hard. This is for a language subject. Nowhere does it tell me that he needs to focus more on speaking, nor does it tell me anything about his understanding of grammar. No concerns were expressed about lack of vocab. So when I taught him for the first time, I was expecting him to be able to complete a few basic sentences.
He is indeed a nice kid. He does try quite hard. But he has huge gaps in his knowledge and that does not come across anywhere in the report.
Fully appreciate teacher workload. As I say, I was a teacher for many years. But given that they're using report writing software there must be software better than this one. Even a tickbox with an area to focus on would be better than this. It will have taken the staff hours to put these reports together and if they don't tell you the basics, they're a waste of everyone's time.

I get similar reports but unlike when I was at school, teachers welcome parents emailing them with questions if PE is insufficient time.

Yes, this is what worries me.

I'm a teacher in a state secondary school.

KS4 get "hand written" reports as well as two other data reports.
KS3 get three data reports stating how they're getting on.

The emphasis now is time spent more effectively. We spend a lot of time phoning parents for children who are underachieving. We also give out achievement points, write postcards home etc...

Written reports aren't always helpful and necessary lower down school and time is much better spent on other areas of contact.

ds got a report twice a year in secondary and the comments on the report were reasonably detailed and informative.

Some were copy/pasted/generated/general but still informative on what was going on in class, what they had covered/were planning on covering next. It would include his marks from any class assessments and then a line or two of more personal comments - such as ds performed very well in the first two tests but the last result was much lower, he needs to revise XYZ further etc. The report helped reinforce/remind ds what he needed to do and let us have a conversation with him around how he planned to do it.

The reports were usually generated before parents evening booking slots came out which meant if teacher was ok and parents ok then they knew they didn't need to book a slot to discuss anything.

The report and the parents evening were important to us as it was really the only contact we had with the school and they helped us to further engage in ds's education.

In my classroom, and my dept, if parents looked at student books it is clear what they need to do to improve. I do not write personalised reports. I DO write hundreds of personalised pieces of feedback across the year. Every 2 weeks. That's where the time has gone and it's MUCH more effective there.

I'm in France. We do 3 reports a year (or 2 for some schools which are now on semesters instead of trimestres). Each subject teacher writes a comment and the form tutor writes a summary, then we have a meeting with all the teachers, the head or deputy head, 2 delegate pupils and 2 parents (occasionally not everyone shows up, but we're expected to be there). These meetings are in the evening (1h30 each, last one usually ends at 20h).
The reports used to be sent out to both parents (paper, snail mail), now they're made available online after the meeting.
It's a huge faff but I can't imagine it not being done at all, how on earth do you follow the progress of the kids otherwise??

You follow the progress by looking at the grades they get for tests, behaviour, homework, classwork, targets in regular reports and from parents eve

One of the issues is that we were no longer allowed to write personal comments - you know, the 'Sally is always on time and keen to answer questions' type stuff, we could only write comments about educational progress. So when little Johnny is thick as mince but really nice and tries so hard and is cheerful and pleasant, we couldn't say the nice stuff, just that he is not achieving whatever level he should be working at. That's not very encouraging for anyone to read. It boiled down to copy/pasting the unit of work/skills that had been achieved, and currently being studied and this can be done just as well with an outline of the skills at each level that is on every report and a number to say which level they have achieved/are working at.

We have actually very little time to do these and in secondary school you might have hundreds to complete. You might see S1 for one period a week, but have 7 classes so potentially 140-210 reports just for S1. With the best will in the world those are not going to be nice personal reports - it will be a copy/paste job.
By sending home a tracking report (on target/working towards, what level, a number for homework) we can do that pretty efficiently several times a year which is actually much more useful than some copy paste thing that refers to your daughter as 'he' sometimes because the teacher forgot to change it and misspells their name. There's little 'personal' about that.