Templated school reports

[AmberTheCat]

My dd2 (Year 2) brought home her report yesterday - lots of lovely comments. My dd1 (Year 6), being the competitive sort decided to go and find her old Year 2 report, to see how they compared.

I was kind of surprised to see how identical similar they are. The text for some subjects was word for word the same, including the examples the teacher used to illustrate her points.

As my kids are four years apart, and had different teachers in Year 2, I assume the school is using some sort of template. Is this usual? I can completely understand that teachers aren't going to come up with 30 completely different ways of saying similar things, but I did feel a little like they'd just drawn from a set of stock phrases, rather than really saying anything personal about my dd. AIBU?

Templates totally usual - I was moaning about this 15 years ago.

A lot of copy and pasting goes on, but even then reports take FOREVER!!

Comments banks are there to assist where needed. I use them minimally and at 30 reports of 1100 words each I have no shame admitting that.
However, that sounds sloppy and thoughtless.

I've had them the occasional wrong name in a section.... Clearly not used the find and replace feature!

There can be problems using find and replace, especially if the name you are replacing is Eve!

I personally loved the comment of getting a lot out of a fieldtrip that DD1 never attended.

Look it's a lot of work - teacher's can't write novels for every child and do the normal day to day, so corners are obviously cut.

I think you have to read these things and take the spirit of comments on board and not sweat too much about unclear wording/ odd mentions of things that didn't happen/ etc...

but given teachers & parents find these long-winded - don't you think we could just move to a quick sheet of A5 with results by topic? Or is that too transparent?

I never minded the old days when teachers made do with "could do better" or "xx is progressing well", or the dreaded "see me".

That's all you need to know as a parent really.

I think I'd prefer a short, personal statement about what my child is like at school and how they are achieving generally (which, to be fair, this report included), plus a list of where they expect a child of her age to be in each subject, and an indication of whether she is achieving or exceeding these (much like the sort of progress tracking system I suspect many schools will move towards when levels go).

I think it's the fact that reports are made to look like personal statements, while clearly being mainly templated, that I find a bit disingenuous.

This year amongst DDs friends reports ( as told to me by their mums) there has been 3 incidences of mixing up he/she and 4 cases of wrong names at least twice in the report. These names weren't miss spelt or slightly wrong they were totally different!!!
Serious cut and pasting going on there.

Maybe parents need to get together ad try and get their voices heard - shorter, to the point but more personal reports - like we used to have in the past, pre computers.

It is no doubt the Government who drive this thing for longer, detailed reports, which then lead to the need for statement banks, templates and more copy/paste.

We found some of my sister's reports from middle school. There was TWO sheets of paper for the entire report, about a third of a page each for English, Maths and Science and then the second A4 page was for every other subject AND the class teacher's personal comment AND the HT's sentence.

We used to get one a4 page (Ireland, secondary school), subject, end of term mark and small comment box by each teacher, and an overall remark by form tutor. Perfectly acceptable!

I agree that a list of levels/grades achieved alongside the average grade/levels expected for that age group tells you everything you need to know. This could be follies by a short 3-4 line personal statement that was actually personal to my child!

But that would be too simple, easy and transparent wouldn't it. Far better to flummox you with learning styles and wolly worded comments so you don't actually realise your child isn't where they should be!

Housebox - ime teachers don't write reports to flummox parents or to cover over children not making progress.

They are long winded because that's what schools are asking teachers to complete.

My son has had a huge number of supply teachers, the latest one has only been in place a few weeks... I wonder who is going to write his report, it's going to be very interesting.

I am not looking forward to it, as I am sure it will just be the final straw of a terrible year..