Pre-school and reception school reports?

[BonsoirAnna]

What do your children get in the way of reports in pre-school and reception? I am interested in form, content and your opinions on what is useful.

Reception - A termly word processed report from the class teacher with a closing comment from the Head of the Pre-Prep. Some additional comments from subject specialists .

Academic subjects such as literacy and numeracy are prefaced with a generic description of the work undertaken that term. The comments that follow are individual although a little formulaic. Mostly it's what I already know.

Contributions from subject specialists are more useful to me as I find it more difficult to guage ability in music/sports.

Most useful are the plenary comments that usually address 'sociability'.

Thank you for that, thedolly. This sounds like a private school?

I have just had the very odd experience of receiving my DD's moyenne section report from her French-English bilingual school and discovering that it follows an identical tick-box format to the petite section. However, things that her petite section teacher thought she had mastered last June her moyenne section teacher does not think she has mastered... I have addressed my concerns to the Parents Association and they are going to raise this with the school... and we are having a brainstorm about what we would like reports to tell parents.

I believe that ds will get a report at the end of the Reception year, purely becuase I remember all my friends who have children a few months older agonising about it last year...

From what they said, it will be based on average targets for this age group in subject areas, so will say things like 'Numeracy - Victor can count from 1 to 10 very well' or similar, ignoring the fact that Victor can actually count to 50, or 100, in two languages, or whatever. I don't know whether this provides a helpful dose of reality as to what the school is working towards, or whether it causes many parents to eat their knuckles off with worry that the teachers are unacquainted with what their children are actually capable of.

not much help, sorry!

For the nursery/pre-school class it was divided into about 8 sections with about a paragraph written under each one. Can't remember the titles now though. It was generally about how he'd formed friendships, liked the teachers, knew the school routine, was learning basic numeracy and could write his name type thing.

DS1 is now in reception and we have termly parents evening but just a report at the end of the year so not sure what form that will take but assuming it will be similar in terms of paragraphs of writing not tick boxes.

DS1 is at private pre-prep but know my nephew whose at lovely state primary just got a tick-box style report which my sister complained about as wasn't terribly helpful.

Our headmaster also writes a comment at the end of each report.

The end of reception reports are the Stepping Stones gobbledy gook. The stepping stones goes up to counting to 1-10 so they don;t comment on anything more.

On the other hand the Chritmas report and the nursery ones were lovely and showed they really knew the dc.

Different definitions of 'mastered' as different teachers? Report writing is time consuming so I can see the appeal of tick boxes. What sort of 'things'? Are the pupils supposed to have a greater level of mastery this year perhaps?

It says things like "utilise le je" (uses "I"), "tient les ciseaux correctement" (holds scissors correctly) which seem like fairly open and shut things to me... I agree that one hypothesis is that they are expected to do the same task to a higher level this year, but nowhere is this explained. We are going to ask the headmistress whether some explanation could be available on the school web site. Lots of parents are very about the assessment of their child's skills.

DS1 also has sort of scrap book in his class room about him (every child has one).

We can look at these whenever we want and they just have little photos/notes about things your child has said or done that were particulary funny/sweet/clever. That gives me a good idea of how he's doing and also the teachers are very good at flagging anything that needs work.

The holding scissors thing is quite funny - am sure that was mentioned on ds1's nursery report come to think of it

I am always a bit of reports. What I find more useful are the opportunities to see books etc. If the school has a full system of awards/merits in operation on a daily basis then this can be more elucidating than either.

It's quite hard to get feedback from school here and, as the parents are from all over the world, I think some clarification would be helpful so that there is greater understanding of the "system".

BonsoirAnna, there is probably already information wrt the tick box system used, it just may not be in a parent friendly form. Perhaps you could volunteer to write it up. It seems that this type of reporting is more akin to a teacher assessment. It reminds me of the Early Years assessment used in England.

Were it that easy... getting the school to understand that it needs to communicate to parents on the appraisal and evaluation system is already going to be an uphill struggle... But that is already on a parent teacher association agenda, so we'll see how far we get with that

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