Should I expect more from school?

[AmyDances]

I have got my dc’s end of year report from school. The comment is the same as the other kids dc knows. Identical. The report uses they/them pronouns so the school didn’t even have to bother checking if they were writing about a boy or girl. AIBU to expect more? I’m not even sure if the HOY knows who my dc is. I know lots of schools use report-writing software but I wouldn’t expect identical results for so many kids and there is a grammar mistake in all of them, so it looks like the HOY has just switched the names of the dc.

I could complain to the HOY but I expect I’ll just get a defensive response about how difficult it is to do so many reports.

If the schools head of year doesn't really know who your child is (assuming you are talking about state secondary), your kid is doing great!

I know it probably feels very impersonal, but realistically the HOY can’t possibly know every child. I suppose they have a paragraph for those children that are doing well, those middle of the road and those not doing great, and they choose the one that’s applicable to your child. I suppose it’s just realities of teaching today.

I would be disappointed if my child’s tutor or immediate teachers did not provide an accurate, personal review.

The HOY absolutely can know every child they’re responsible for. Ours do. We do copy sentences etc for reports but I’d be really disappointed with this approach - you should always check it’s relevant and accurate to the child. I’d email and frame it as needing further guidance for next year.

A HOY comment? Is it something like "This is a great report and it is lovely to see X has been working so hard all year, and I'm sure they're going to have a fantastic Y8' sort of thing?

Yeah, the school would be better off ditching that comment altogether. Expecting anything more personalised isn't going to happen.

My DC’s secondary school avoids this by giving no comments at all from anyone on school reports. We just get a list of subjects and a list of effort and achievement marks.
HOY will spend all their time dealing with children who are struggling, so a hid thing if your DCs doesn’t know who they are.

Surely that depends on how many kids are in the year. I have 2 DC in different schools, 1 had 276 students in the year, they don't add a head of year comment to the reports. The other has 110 per year and there is a comment from the HoY and Head teacher but they are copy and paste jobs which I understand, I would rather them spend the time teaching or on pastoral support than thinking of an individual note , they have been intouch separately if needed anyway.

Until you start getting GCSE grades/predictions reports are fairly useless. Hopefully you know if your child is a PITA as school have already contacted you. Hopefully you know if your child is struggling, as school are in contact with you. So a report is a way of contacting the bulk of the parents whose child gets on with things, and doesn't cause any issues or concerns.
Take it as a compliment!

Surely that depends on how many students are in the year and what their needs are. We have 350 students per year, the HOY spends their time on the students that need extra pastoral help/support for whatever reason. If they got to know every single child, that would take time away from those that need it.

HOY comments are just a standard "X has had a good year, plenty of solid advice here for them to follow". What are you really expecting? If there are specific issues, you'll already know.

Depending on the size of the school, the HOY would need to write 210 comments, in addition to their teaching load and the constant pastoral tasks which increase as the term wears on. We don't bother with comments anymore parents get data only, once a term. That could be 300 reports a year for a typical teacher.

It's to be expected that a lot of the report comments are generic. Hundreds of reports to write means very little personalisation.

However, errors should be weeded out by having someone proof read them.

Yes, we all want a personalised education for our child. But the reality is that state schools (AND often private as well) are factories, churning children out. Until the workload is reduced, it'll never be any different.

I'm sure teachers would love to have the time to write a fully personalised report for each child, just ask the HOY I'm sure they'll agree they would love to have the time but alas they don't

I wouldn’t be worried that the HOY doesn’t know my child properly, but it is incredibly lazy and disrespectful not to refer to children by their correct sex.

Using report writing software is fine IMO, but teachers do need to ensure that reports are still personal and accurate.

It really grates on me if they're using 'they'
I noticed the opticians started to do that in the latest letters sent! Never used to!

I had DD’s report last week. Her Y8 PE comments are word for word identical to her brother’s Y8 comments - he’s in Y11 now. So the head of PE hasn’t changed his comments in 3 years! Honestly I just laughed, she’s doing fine, they would let me know if there were any issues. She’s happy, the school is great, I can let it slide if the teachers have stock comments for reports.

Teachers are allocated no working time to provide these, it's as many additional hours on top of directed teaching time as necessary.

If there are 30 kids in the class, they've covered the same thing and been asked to show the same skills. Many will be at the same level and most will therefore have the same experience of the same subject.

I'd be inclined to accept the comments are just factual and relevant. They can certainly be applicable to more than one individual.

HOY does not write reports in our school the subject teachers do. I didn’t even know this was a thing.

It's not clear who the personal part is supposed to be from?

If it's hoy with hundreds of students I agree it's not easy to be personal in these circumstances however if it's from teaches or form tutors then I would expect something more personal yes

Unfortunately unless parents pick this up and complain nothing will be done and their boss may not even realise what's going on.

Who do you think their boss is? It's another teacher who absolutely will know and uses the same system. A teacher (like me) who teaches entire year groups have hundreds of these to write. Believe it not, the majority of teens approach any given subject in fairly similar ways with fairly similar outcomes. About three stock reports from "fantastic" to "steady" to "inconsistent" progress covers most of them, accurately and truthfully. Very few outliers in either direction need individual crafting.

We had someone else's name on my sons report in the text this year. And it is a smallish school with only around 200 students in total. I am not going to bother saying anything because it doesnt matter.

Yeah that would annoy me too. Especially the grammatical error. Probably pointless and a bit petty but you could email the school and point out that 1. Your child is a female not ‘they’, 2. The comments are IDENTICAL to the other students that you have seen and 3. To top it all it’s ‘their’ not there. Those three points pretty much render the whole point of a report useless and it might as well have been written about Mickey Mouse.

My DC are in primary and I have to say their reports are really tailored to them. I can spot their personalities from the teacher’s comments. The Head writes his comments and admittedly when they were in reception and early years the comments are very generic like ‘Suzy has fitted in well to St Cuthberts and made a great start to school life’. But as they get older their observations have definitely been on the money.

We get very generic reports from both primary and secondary school. There are so many kids it is hard for the teacher to write customised reports. You really need to be on top of this yourself, get them to read to you, check their homework for accuracy etc. No school teacher and no external tutor will do this for you.

Reports will all be ai soon anyway

Unfortunately the days of any sort of personal feedback are gone unless your in private school.

Wrong names , generic copied comments , it's all meaningless maybe we should just get rid of them altogether.

@roses2 I agree I realised during COVID how much my DC needed me to try and step up to teacher role esp in primary so I did

Unfortunately we can't rely on any experts now unless your DC is above average or solidly middle of the road.

You have to get all over it yourself if you want to help your DC.
Do not rely on any school esp at primary.

YABU to expect the HOY to do anything other than glance over their behaviour/achievement points and their effort and attainment grades then select/write a comment based on that.

Our year groups have about 250 kids so even 2 minutes per report to look at data the enter details would take over 8 hours.

A HOY has way more useful things to be doing.

Only our Y10 and Y12s get written reports. The other year groups get progress reports showing effort and attainment.