Effort grades in school report

[Gogos]

I've just received my Year 2 boy's interim report. The school's system is to give grades of A, B or C for "progress" and A, B, C or D for "effort" for Reading, Writing and Maths.

Now, whilst I know DS is not a particularly high achiever from an ability perspective, I always thought he at least tried hard at school. But he has received two Bs and a C for his effort grades.

So the question is... how to get a Year 2 boy to improve his effort at school?

I would ask the teacher.
What is he not doing that he should be?

e.g.
Concentration (staring out the window)
Chatting
Perseverance (giving up too easily)
Independence (requiring adult to be with him for him to work)
etc

Effort grades on school reports are utterly worthless; worse than useless, in fact.

Many years ago when I trained as a teacher, I wrote my thesis on effort grades, and I still think they are a Bad Thing. I would be wary of relying on them to give an accurate picture of a child's progress, as they are for the most part, completely arbitrary.

Effort is impossible to accurately measure, and to grade it is absurd. One person cannot possibly know how much effort another is making in any given task. The marks at best are meaningless, at worse they communicate a very negative message- effort grades are often used as 'compensation' for low attainment grades, and teachers can unwittingly communicate the message "However hard you try, you will only ever be average" by giving a low attainment grade paired with a high effort grade; ironically when they are trying to communicate exactly the opposite.

Load of old bollocks, they are

Thing is it depends on the teacher. A for this teacher might be so rare she gives max of 1-2 a form. Another teacher might give everyone an A unless she has evidence to the contrary.

Thanks for the thoughts. I always had the impression that he did work hard at school. That's what his Yr1 teacher said, especially in maths (despite him being in the bottom set).

We always finish a home reader every night so not sure what is going wrong there. His writing isn't the neatest, and he doesn't come up with very inventive sentences for his spelling words, so maybe we need to do more there...

The report offers so little to go on though, to know how best to support our DCs.