School reports - some strange surprises...

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I am sure I posted something similar last year!

Just got dd's year 3 report. They have a 1 to 4 system, with 1 being the highest score. I was a bit surprised by some of the scores! So dd is great at reading and writing but I think she struggles with maths. But she got a 1 for maths and 2 for writing... She is quite musical - plays the piano and sings in school choir - yet got a 2 for music....

I know that sometimes she is not great at listening to instructions. Could that be it?

Is it an achievement score or an effort score?

All schools have different systems. It could be for effort rather than achievement, but you'll have to ask the teacher. Really it should have been made clear on the report itself!

As others have said sound like effort scores. Just like DD's reports 2s in her strongest subjects where she is coasting (that another story) 1s in not so strong subjects.

No, these are achievement scores. There were separate scores for effort. Hence my surprise.

Music is a law on itself when it comes to school grading. Ds is preparing for grade 5 singing and grade 3 guitar yet he is only national curriculum levle 3B in year 7. He is national curriculum levels 4 to 6 in all his other subjects so I don't understand why his grade for music is so crap.

That's interesting ReallyTired. Maybe some areas are very subjective and influenced by other factors...

I guess it's a bit hard to ask a teacher about it... I guess I would if she got a really low score...

She also got a 2 for PE, despite the fact that they did swimming this term and she is actually a competitive swimmer and very athletic... But I could well imagine her mucking up some complicated egg and spoon race at the school sports day!

Music is a lot of small group work. Often the group gets given the same grade. My son's friends muck about in music so the whole group is given the same crap grade. Its more than a little unfair.

Perhaps school sport has the same stupid system of assessment as music.

School reports can be quite odd. I still laugh at the report that said that through school my daughter had 'mastered basic gymnastics skills'. This was when she was in year One and training 6+ hours a week in a competitive squad and had taken her first regional grading. A tad beyond 'basic gymnastics skills'. Sometimes I think the teacher just doesn't stop to think .

Sometimes it's just weird. Ds was told off for vejbg disruptive in a class where someone with the same first name was v disruptive, and he was mouselike. Teacher refused point blank to recognise she had mixed them up. Other child was much much better at the subject.... I didn't recognise the description at all.

Glad to see it's not just me!

Lecherrs - that's hilarious,

I recently went through all my school reports & was rather appalled by what I found. My year 6 report described me as "popular and well-liked by her peers". This was the year when one girl told all the other girls I'd done/said something still don't know what I was supposed to have done & they all stopped talking to me apart from one or 2 who just said they weren't getting involved before rejoining their friends. I bought a football sticker album just so I'd have something to talk to the boys about. In fact, many of my reports featured the word 'popular'. It was never true.

I'm planning to HE my DC but if we do end up sending them to school I'll be taking all reports with a pinch of salt! Have you talked to your DD about it? How does she feel she's doing?

lecherrs, my mum was rather surprised to learn in my year 7 report that I was making good progress towards learning to swim a length of the school pool. I think she assumed that I'd been mixed up with someone who wasn't swimming with a club 3 times a week and who hadn't represented that club at county level. I did have to put her straight that those that could swim spent he lesson doing lengths and working on improving strokes, speed or distance and those that couldn't spent the time messing about in the shallow end diving through hoops and picking up toys off the bottom and I knew which of those activities I preferred.

Tbf to her, she never outed me to the PE teacher, I did that myself in year 8 so did eventually get my comeuppance.

I've never bothered much with my dcs music reports from school.
They have classes and grade exams outside school, and these marks mean more to me.
Tbh I don't think the class teachers know their clefs from their crotchets. I think my dcs also like messing about in class in school, playing the triangle, for eg, and singing out of key.

Same for sports, my dd certainly never tells the teacher that she does a lot of sport outside school, and gets a 'could try harder' grade.

She's basically dossing around in PE class, and, i can understand why.
They are put in mixed ability groups, so always have to 'carry' the unfit klutz who has concrete boots, and no hand eye coordination... There's no sense of personal achievement.

Wrt their other subjects, I know their strengths and weaknesses already. What I like to read are the teachers' comments about their personalities and social skills, to see if they actually know who they're talking about.

Reallytired dd1 is very musical (did grade 5 singing and piano in year 6/beginning of year 7) so I was quite surprised to find in music she was fairly middle of her form at 4B in year 7.
However this year they've been doing much more composing and musical terms etc. and she's scoring the highest in her year and was close on an 8 last term.
The stuff they did in year 7 just didn't suit her.

The PE grades I think are completely way off. For a start off they give the whole class the same grade (mixed, not done on ability). Then they only do each sport for 6 weeks. So each time the reassess it's on a different sport. Can be totally different. So if you had a child who was good and played outside at say tennis, but a slow runner (that was me!) then if they were assessed one time on tennis, then athletics you should get totally different marks.

I put in the suggestion box last term that they just rate effort in PE. Shall see if they've taken that idea on when I get the report.

I don't want to make excuses for teachers not knowing their children, but I do think that for the foundation subjects in particular the assessment tends to be less rigorous purely because the massive workload involved in assessing core subjects inevitably pushes other subjects to the side. They also may not have been covered in class to anything like the degree that core subjects have, so it is harder to assess accurately. This is for primary when one teacher is teaching all subjects, not where there are specialist teachers. Although even in that case, it's difficult for a music teacher who is spending 30 mins a week with 30 children to really gauge their skills especially if outside the fairly narrow scope of the curriculum. When I taught Year 1 and 2 I was certainly guilty of using rather broad strokes in my reporting of subjects like history, geography, music, DT because I spent so many hours trying to be as accurate as possible with levels for maths, literacy and science. I'm in Reception now and really enjoying reporting on lots of different areas, particularly communication and language and personal and social, because those are really at the heart of all learning.