Good school reports - easy for teachers to use but beneficial for parents

[RoadArt]

Most of you will probably remember me for my maths projects. I am now starting to investigating changing school reports that are of benefit to parents but not a pain and long winded for teachers. The teachers have access to all the necessary data but not the means of translating this to parents.

I have read the posts in the past about what parents do and dont want, but now I am actually after recommendations of software you use, which companies to avoid, which are worth looking at.

Our current reports give "below, at, or above expectation" as a global label for the core topics. The teachers dont have to specify how far below or almost at and will give grades like 2c, 2b, 2a or percentile figures if they feel like it but dont have to.

The teachers want to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each child as a whole to include academic, social, arts, sports and other unique skills and dont want the reports to lump into one boring brief one liner.

As times are a changing the school knows they need to improve but need a starting point on what does and doesnt work,

As there are many fantastic teachers on here I would appreciate your advise as to where I should start.

I am not UK based so what rules currently apply in the UK are not applicable here - yet - but they are moving to follow uk rules

Thank you

What ever you choose someone will be unhappy. Parents all want different things - some like a narrative description of their child's strengths and weaknesses, other want just levels and numerical data, some want class ranking, others don't. If you provided everything from all the parents wish list teachers would find it totally unmanageable; bearing in mind each child's takes staff at my school a minimum of 4 hours to write, print, copy and collate and they are about 16 lines (typed) of narrative for Literacy, Numeracy and Science, half an A4 page of personal comments, pupil levels and next step targets in all strands of English and Maths and a few sentences and effort and attainment grades per subject for all other subjects.

I appreciate that people want different things but we want to provide more info than we do now.
I know there are generic guidelines available but have only just started the project and was hoping someone could point me in the right direction of which reports are easy to work with, without it taking hundreds of hours.
I am very aware that too much time is taken in writing reports, creating folders, photocopying etc., and we are looking at a different approach on how to present the same information but reduce man hours.

A mum not a teacher, but I love DD's schools system for keystage 2. We get effort cards every half of term graded 1 to 4, 1 - consistently exceptional effort, 2 - good effort 3 - satisfactory effort 4 - below satisfactory effort. There are 10 area on which effort is grade given letter codes and staff put in the letter codes where the child needs to improve. At the end of the year we get a full written report. Even though DD is only in year 3 we were able to sit down and discuss where she needs to improve - coming into class and settling down straight away, staying on task even when it is challenging and not getting distracted. At parents evening the teacher had reported a noticeable improvement in all these areas.