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?

Ha ha ha ha!
Way to tell you know nothing about teacher's workload, without saying you know nothing about teacher's workload!!!!

Our kids are tested and analysed constantly, if you want to understand where they are excelling or failing understand the content and look in their books. Progress Grades and behaviour/effort grades termly are a sufficient overview.

Sadly secondary teachers simply don’t have time to write reports.

Why schools do not use AI to write report?
we are using it for performance feedback at my company. You put key words and concepts in it which you can do across the year and the report is created. Just needs to be checked. It cuts 90 % of the time. And there was a post saying reports need to be checked at 3 levels. This is insane. We talk about teachers not monkeys!! I am sure loads of this type of management checking happens a lot as it gives power to people and it is totally non-sense other than wasting a lot of time.

I teach about 500 children across 25 classes (I teach my subject to nearly all of KS3).
Who would be teaching them while I write these reports? Or am I supposed to spend my evening doing it? In which case who’s planning my lessons and doing my marking?
Maybe I’m supposed to spend the holidays that I’m not paid for writing them?

I’m a teacher and Head of Year. Our school still does written reports once a year for each year group, spaced throughout the year.

We are currently in the midst of our report cycle for my year group. In order to manage reports on top of my normal workload I have been working until gone 11 every night this week, and will be going into school all day today (Saturday) to get everything done by the deadline. I spent all my daughter’s nap times and after she was in bed working last weekend too, including Mother’s Day, and feel like I’ve barely seen her in the last week. I’m exhausted and it inevitably takes a toll on my family too. I’m also pregnant.

Part of this is because I’m a Head of Year so need to write a report for every pupil in my year group (200 of them) but also as others have said I am responsible for doing a second proof-read of all the subject and form tutor reports to make sure that they’re not going home littered with typos. I write all my reports individually rather than copying and pasting, as I actually find that quicker, but inevitably with so many of them to do I do end up repeating my phrasing if it applies in multiple cases. I teach year 11, who have just completed a set of mock papers for me to mark, and year 13, whose coursework is due in next week so am frantically trying to get them over the line with that. The workload is simply unmanageable. This is the impact that writing reports has on teachers and their families.

All that being said, I do agree with you that parents should receive feedback on how their children are getting on in order to help and support them. My daughter is only a toddler, but I know when she goes to school I would find it really difficult if I didn’t have much idea of how she was getting on. DH is also a teacher and his school don’t do reports - whilst I’m broken and knackered, I can’t help thinking that at least from the parents’ perspective my school is getting that right. But definitely not from the teachers’ perspective!

I don’t know what the solution is really. Personally I would infinitely prefer to do two Parents’ Evenings for each year group, as opposed to one and then a set of reports, which take up at least 10 x as much time. You’d still get the same amount of feedback, just in a different format.

Checks need to happen because errors happen. Teachers aren't perfect so reports are checked.
AI reports would not go down well at all. Copy and Paste elements are already judged by many.

I get the same from my sons state secondary and think the lack of personalised insight is quite sad. I'm currently going through an adult ADHD diagnosis and my school reports are part of the picture. I was just thinking the other day, with the way they are written now, you can clearly tell the one sentence statements are copy and paste and you wouldn't be able to rely on something like that to pick up on issues as the subtle nuances and personal insight from the teacher are just not there.

Most schools do full written. That are a nightmare for staff and they take hours. Half the parents don’t bother to read them.

I never understand how parents are told teachers have so high a workload nowadays/so little time, yet as parents what I see is teachers spending far less time than they did when i was child.

My mum was a primary teacher and this meant:

• Producing her own resources and worksheets by hand (schools now seem to universally use sheets from twinkl, content from white rose maths)
• Writing reports, by hand then on computer (many schools have pared back this considerably)
• Running an activity after school one day a week - every teacher did, be it art, netball choir etc (every school in my area, the only clubs now are paid for and run by private providers, the teachers run none)
• hearing ks1 children read regularly one to one (my child is in a recently inspected school rated good, well regarded locally), but only the 3 or 4 children with the most serious learning or behavioural needs are ever heard read one on one, even in reception).

So I'd be interested to understand what the workload is now that is taking up all the time and then some, for the things no longer having time spent time on them.

I know there's a huge issue around higher levels of SEN support but is this the only factor?

If an element is the need to assess kids and monitor their progress, the sensible thing would be go share that data with parents so they can better support learning.

I never understand why teachers often seem so reluctant for parents to know the details of how their children are getting on

“Then senior leaders have to check them for spelling and punctuation.”

If teachers can’t be trusted to get spelling and punctuation correct what hope is there?!

@piginpastry plenty of talented teachers who are dyslexic out there, doing an amazing job in Maths or PE Depts for example. Don't be ridiculous.

In our dept it's usually when we re-timetable to reduce cover.

I’ll happily write reports for the 235 students every single term if you provide the 10 days cover each time it would take me to write them.

I bet if you looked at the written reports you receive, they’ll be very little between one child and the next.

The grading system with points for 4 different attributes (HW, ready for lesson, performance in lesson, etc) actually gives a lot more insight to a child’s performance when put with their predicted grade.

What would be more beneficial would be if the parents actually booked and came to parents evening, rather than booking and not attending, or just not booking at all.

I would say that there’s a massive correlation between student who do well at school and parents who attend parents evening.

Haven’t got the time to reply to every point as currently adapting my resources for lessons next week, but you have no idea. Whatsoever. Full stop

We do - a couple of times a year progress reports, once a year a written report with full
comment from tutor and comment bank comments from teachers. Also parents evening - it has to stay 5 mins as when you teach multiple classes in one year it’s impossible to see more kids than that. Ours run from 2.30-7.30 and I am often full.

I more than happy to give direct feedback to parents via email - phone calls are also possible but my time in school is limited as I am part time (it’s not as simple as ‘days in/days off’ - I have choppy hours where I am in for different parts of day on different days. I am usually free 8-9 ish but feels a bit early to call!)

I taught 250 children last academic year. If I were to spend 5 min per child writing a personalised comment that would take roughly 20 hours. That's not insignificant. If we want to bring personalised reports back then we need to find those 20 hours from somewhere else in the directed time calendar. At my school we have a hour a week set aside for calls home so we can speak to parents of each member of our tutor group plus any parents of students we teach. We aim to call home for each member of the tutor group once a half term. Personally I think you can get a lot more out of a 5 min phone call than you would get from a written comment.

Research shows the formative feedback is much more effective than summative. So, for example, your child should receive detailed feedback after doing an assessment on how to improve (lots of schools use WWW and EBI.) This is more immediate than an end of year comment and the child can actually use it to improve next time. In addition, your child will receive lots of feedback in lessons which is also shown to be more effective. Immediacy is key - a mini whiteboard activity will show whether they have understood what they’re being taught and it can be put right straight away.
All the “Jonny is a popular member of the class who has made good progress this year” comments are nice to reminisce about, but they don’t have any actual impact on Jonny’s learning.
Parents should be encouraged to look in students’ exercise books or at assessments in secondary school to find detailed feedback. When they start doing mocks, I’m sure they will find feedback to be very detailed and targeted.

Last year it took me probably 15 plus hours to write the reports for the children in my class. (23, primary school) I spent a lot of time on main subjects, e.g. literacy, numeracy, IDL, hwb and also have individual feedback on their other lessons too. When it came to putting the text into the actual report form (I typed it all on word first) I had to significantly reduce what I had written because there was a word limit of, I think, 1000 characters. I felt awful because the reports then seemed impersonal because I had to add the bare necessities, rather than what I had actually written. So, sometimes there is hardly any room on the computer form to input more information.

A recent report stated that teachers work up to 26 unpaid hours overtime a week. They calculated that this was £15000 worth each year. Teachers are still giving up their evenings and weekends, as well as working through half terms etc.

But what has changed? It was the standard for decades. Why is it no longer possible?

But it wasn’t standard for decades. When I was at secondary , we just got a line for each subject. Some teachers managed to squeeze in a longer sentence by writing small. Mine mostly consisted of, ‘could do better’ although I once got, ‘pleasing work’ for maths.

DS started school in 1990 and it was still short reports, but a couple of years later, they were much longer and descriptive though didn’t really tell you anything you didn’t already know. By secondary it was a page per subject and I felt really sorry for the teachers having to do that. That was in a small school with low staff turnover. How much more arduous in a large school especially for subjects where a teacher has a lot of different pupils for a couple of lessons a week.Way too time consuming!

@SellFridges I have to type in every grade for every report (often across multiple systems). They aren't computer generated in my experience.

@student26 ah rookie error! Always check the character count on the software before writing the damn things!

I had a different career for the 15 years or so before entering teaching: one involving a lot of writing and editing complex technical stuff for some demanding audiences.

One of the reasons schools have dropped written reports ime is a general amateurish approach to the whole thing. People doing writing need a clear brief, a style guide, a word or character limit and sufficient time to do the job. Teacher literacy is also not what it might be (and the younger the teacher, the more of an issue it tends to be, unless they were educated outside the UK). It will be interesting to see if the Gove curriculum reforms (all those fronted adverbials) improve the situation. Sadly, probably not...we'll just use AI I expect.

I never understand how parents are told teachers have so high a workload nowadays/so little time, yet as parents what I see is teachers spending far less time than they did when i was child.

Well I'm a secondary teacher. I've been in school 8-5:30 every day this week as usual, except on Tuesday when I was there until 7:30, doing 37 back-to-back parents ' evening appointments from 5-7:30 without even a loo break. I often work once I get home too, but I am absolutely shattered this week, so I have only done that once.

I will spend most of this weekend working, as I have 2 sets of assessments to mark, my week's lessons to plan, cover work to set for when I will be off-timetable doing my second class of mock y11 speaking exams (I also need to listen to all of my first class and mark them this weekend). That alone will take many hours. I also need to book cover for the school trip I'll be running after Easter. I have about another 25 things on my to-do list which I have no idea how I'm going to get done.

I'm sorry that you appear to think teachers are lying about increased workload and want proof that they aren't. Maybe a primary teacher will post abou5 their workload to convince you. I doubt they have time though. The 40,000 who left the profession last year should be proof enough.

It is possible.

But as others have said, in general schools are very focused on what helps students get better GCSEs.

Suppose it takes 20 hours (per teacher) to write a set of reports for a year group.

There are 7 year groups in the school.

That's 140 hours per teacher.

That time does not help the students pass their GCSEs or a levels. It's purely providing information to someone else.

In general schools now assess much more frequently and that data is provided to SLT/goes home.

So my old school, there were assessments every half term. Those were marked.
The data from those assessments - a level grade, gcse grade, or just the score for ks3 - is then put into the central school data system by the teachers say this takes 3 hours.

This means that the teachers then know if a student is getting off track - under or over achieving - very quickly compared to if they did an exam at the end of the year.

So instead of 20 hours writing a written report for parents once a year, you are getting less detail but more often.

A lot of schools collect internal data every half term and use this to put on additional intervention groups etc. some schools share it with parents.

Again, the theory is that parents have better information about how their kid is doing term by term, and because they are getting the information more frequently it can't be written reports.

@Isitovernow123
Haven’t got the time to reply to every point as currently adapting my resources for lessons next week, but you have no idea. Whatsoever. Full stop

Well no, i have no idea.... its why i was asking. It gets frustrating, as parents we WANT to be helpful, I'd do more at home to support my kids etc but it feels like no one will explain the different things required of teachers that take all the time. Parents could be a huge force to argue for changes to help reduce teaching workload but teachers put answers like this whenever we ask for information.