Any teachers about? Can you tell me about assessment data

[SholaMola]

If there are any primary teachers about please can you tell me the following:

How are children assessed?
Are there government targets for how much progress a child should make in a year?
What happens to schools if these targets are not met?
Where does this data go? Lea? Department of education?
How is this data QAd? Is it by an external body or by a colleague?
If a child starts a new year with falsely inflated levels, how does that impact on the next teacher?

What's more perplexing is they have 3 members of staff able to diagnose dyslexia.
Really? Like full inn ed psychs? I'm stunned. I've never known a school have anyone employed who can officially diagnose dyslexia. In fact as pps have said it is notoriously difficult and expensive to get a diagnosis generally so a lot of schools just make an educated guess and use dyslexia friendly strategies with any likely children. So again as pps have said you don't then gain anything in those schools if you get the full diagnosis.

Full on ed psyschs

Dyslexia can be diagnosed by specialist teachers, and yes, they have 3 at the school by all accounts.

That’s very unusual to have so many school staff trained as there are expensive and time-consuming qualifications to be gained. If they have these then they can assess and diagnose dyslexia so I don’t see why they wouldn’t! At my school we care very much about the children who appear to have dyslexia but can not afford to fund assessments to officially diagnose (seeing as it wouldn’t change what we do anyway). Some parents choose to go down the private route at around £750.

Internal tracking/data doesn’t go to the LA. It stays in school and it used as a tool for teachers to plan learning. Ideally. It is often used to beat teachers up and pay progression can be linked to it. It’s not one teacher’s sole fault if there’s an error in it though - senior leaders should be undertaking or arranging moderation etc. We have our pupils’ Y2 assessments and keep an eye on how children are doing against these in Y3-5. A child scoring a lot lower or higher than expected would be looked at closely to check the teacher assessment is accurate.

You are right to focus on what can be done for your daughter now rather than what’s gone on before. I suspect the Y5 teacher is thinking ahead to SATs and there needs to be evidence of ‘normal classroom practice’ for the school to be allowed to make adjustments for your daughter (e.g. extra time, photocopying the test onto coloured paper etc).

"A child scoring a lot lower or higher than expected would be looked at closely to check the teacher assessment is accurate. " in our case a whole class scoring much higher were queried by subject leaders and teachers who had previously taught the class and books were scrutinised. Ofsted and Governors praised the teacher for accelerated progress (governors patted each other on the back for employing such an outstanding teacher). None of the work was the children's own independent effort all was heavily supported to the point that answers were given to the children.

They have 3 specialist dyslexia teachers in one school? That's shocking in itself, but even more shocking then that they didn't diagnose earlier.

It takes a massive amount of training to become a dyslexia assessor and you don't usually get that among mainstream teachers.
dyslexiaaction.org.uk/training-to-become-a-specialist-assessor/

I’m sceptical that a school would have three teachers trained to diagnose dyslexia and would still miss a child with dyslexia till Y5 who would then be diagnosed by an Ed Psych. Is there some misunderstanding and what is meant is three teachers who’ve had dyslexia training?

I have no reason to believe the data isn’t accurate

What system is being used to create this data Bubbles?

Think about GCSEs. A couple of exam papers for each subject, externally marked by a national team of people who have been specially trained to mark that exam, with quality assurance procedures, sampling of marking etc and still every year tonnes are sent for remarks and grades go up or down.

noblegiraffe the SENCO teacher can definitley assess for dyslexia because she kept saying she's add her to the list, but then not doing anything. She told me two other teachers could assess for dyslexia so I'm going on what she said. Perhaps she meant screening which might be a different thing. I really don't know as this is not my area. But she can assess and didn't.

I suspect that what she meant was an informal assessment of dyslexic symptoms rather than an official diagnosis. For this you need to have gone through so much training and it tends to be onlt specialist teachers on the LEA team rather than a mainstream teacher.

All primary schools should now have assessment policies for producing data. They can be LA produced or commercial.

We use a computer program, produced by our existing commercial provider, which can be interrogated for reports. It’s updated about 4-5 times a year. Our whole ethos is no surprises at Sats! We don’t want to over state and we have probably been too reluctant to say children are secure! We would never, ever, congratulate ourselves on appointments like that described above. Teacher recruitment is delegated to the head anyway.

Primary assessment is nowhere near the same as predicting exam results at gcse. Only desperate schools use it to hold a gun to a teacher’s head. Obviously systems need to bed in and I would worry that the OP’s DD was not being assessed by an experienced (or good) teacher in Y4. They clearly had no classroom monitoring if they fed answers and no monitoring by curriculum leads. Poor management. It isn’t good enough.

Excellent senior leadership in primaries knows who isn’t getting good progress or who is trying to cover their backside by being too generous with judgements. It’s often a symptom of poor teaching and will be under review and CPD offered. This is why there will be a lot of moderation! Evidence will be looked at very closely. This subject is taken very seriously because Sats are affected and Ofsted will smell a giant rat if a school overstates progress and attainment and doesn’t address shortcomings because it doesn’t know what they are. It’s very foolish for any SLT to overstate progress.

We treat pupils who have paid for expensive SpLD diagnosis the same as those who we believe have SpLD. Otherwise those who pay would take all the resources. We don’t believe that’s fair. The school pays for EdPsych visits.

Excellent senior leadership in primaries knows who isn’t getting good progress

No, they might think they do but you can’t measure progress.

"Poor management. It isn’t good enough." I'd agree the teacher in question was the deputy head

Just seen this on twitter. sigplus.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-progress-delusion.html

“Schools should not be wasting their time inventing data to keep people happy, they should not be wasting time training teachers in the complexities of 'byzantine number systems'; they should be using that time for CPD, for advancing teachers' curriculum knowledge and improving and embedding effective assessment strategies. That way improvement lies.”

Those lovely computer programmes produce pretty graphs and charts that impress the impressionable

H I'm a teacher so speaking from experience. First thing I would ask you is what was her data at the end of reception and end of year 2? If she was achieving what she should have by then there is no reason she should be below now. Predictions of children are based on these end of key stage results. If she was on track then I would suggest it's the teaching that's to blame on year 3 or 4 x

I'd suggest that naive

Tbh as a parent im rather appalled that those suspected of dyslexia are just treated as if they have it rather than diagnosed. As the op says it can give the pupil extra time in exams etc. So it is certainly not in the pupils best interests.
Possibly a query to OFSTED to look at schools who report so many dc with suspected but not diagnosed dyslexia (otherwise it rather sounds like cheating by giving the weakest extra exam time etc in SATs.)

I certainly think the data is manipulated. I can think of no other reason why children would be reported as expected when clearly exceeding.

I think, whilst pretty hard especially for the youngest, the yr 2 sats are not going to give an accurate prediction of what a child is capable for yr6. This is because yr2 is only a few times tables add/subtract etc whereas im sure by yr 6 it's much more complicated.
Same with english answering a few comprehension questions isnt comparable to loads of complicated grammar.

I dont think yr 2 sats are timed exactly are they?

Hello, yes they are timed at an approximate time give or take 5 mins only. I can assure you it's not just a few times tables, add or subtract. Go online and look at a sample maths reasoning paper at ks1 level. It's obviously easier but based on the age of the child it's all relative. If they are suspected dyslexic it has not come on over night and signs should have been there before. Especially to be so far behind as the original op said xx

Assessment data is tricky to understand. I frequently assess progress of the children I teach as well as my own children. I use a variety of methods to assess including worksheets quizzes games etc.

As a governing body, we are not impressionable. I deeply resent the implication that we don’t know what we are looking at and are somehow deluded. You also imply, Mrz, that teachers have one magic formula that cannot be shared with Others because we are too stupid to understand it. Fortunately the maths grads on our GB understand everything!

Assessment has to be quantified. This is the data that we see. Not individual children but trends and current “judgements” for each year group. By using a computer program, as opposed to a quill pen, ink and an abacus, the data is presented in a uniform and understandable way. How should assessment and progress data be reported to Governors so we can make informed decisions? Clearly all data is dependent on accurate assessment of progress but professional teachers are tasked with that. We need to know our strengths and weaknesses. We need evidence for that. We need to improve our weaknesses. How the evidence is presented is up to us and the Head. If it meets our requirements, does it matter if it’s via a computer program? I hate this sniffy approach to the way some schools work. At least we don’t have children years behind and don’t know about it! Ofsted found our leadership Outstanding - We know what we are doing and we have robust information. I am happy with that!

Clearly all data is dependent on accurate assessment of progress but professional teachers are tasked with that.

And yet the ex head of Education Datalab who knows quite a lot about data thinks it can’t be done. rebeccaallen.co.uk/2018/05/23/what-if-we-cannot-measure-pupil-progress/

Maths grads on your GB might understand graphs but if they’re not teachers then they most likely don’t understand why the data going into it is crap.

Ex-primary teacher here. One of the main reasons I gave up was that our new head imposed three parallel systems of assessment which involved hours of putting numbers in boxes on spreadsheets. Every FOUR WEEKS we had to give our classes formal written SATS type tests in reading comp, GPS, and maths - about 7 exam papers every four weeks from Y1 upwards. Every single mark for every child for every separate question on every test paper had to be inputted in a spreadsheet. This would be followed by a monthly pupil progress meeting where, if the data did not show that every child had made progress points in every subject, we were threatened with dire consequences like capability, extra SMT lesson observations, daily book scrutinies and being moved to a different year group. His other agenda was finding reasons to declare anyone over 30 incapable so that he could replace us with cheap NQTs. We voted with our feet and the entire staff left within 18 months.

There was an awful lot of pressure to make up data or massage the figures in order to avoid a bollocking at the pupil progress meetings. But also, one of my colleagues had a super bright class. They had very high scores when she handed them over to their next teacher. The head hated her (she argued back at him) and accused her of making up the data to make herself look good. He made her ex-class spend a week re-doing all their tests from the previous two terms to prove she had lied about their scores. They did brilliantly and proved she hadn't inflated the data. He was even more vile to her after that!!!

I hope you get good help for your DD. It's good that she's been diagnosed by the EP and not just by private testing. We used to get some very odd dyslexia diagnoses from private testing. We used to say that private consultants always seemed to declare children dyslexic as that was the diagnosis the paying parents wanted. When I was teaching Y6 I had endless debates with a mother who was convinced her son was dyslexic "because all our family are". He showed no signs of dyslexia and went on to achieve a level 6 (old style SATS) for reading and for GPS. Even after that she wanted to know what extra support the secondary school would give him for his dyslexia (Answer: NONE, because they'll know he got level 6s!)

Tbh as a parent im rather appalled that those suspected of dyslexia are just treated as if they have it rather than diagnosed
As a parent and a teacher I'm stunned that you're appalled. Do you know how much time and money it takes to get a formal assessed of dyslexia? Teachers appalled re generally not dumb and if a child is presenting with the symptoms of dyslexia then diagnosis or not they will most likely benefit from a few simple strategies. Once these are in place and shown to be helping the child then it would be only right to use these normal working practices in sats. Otherwise as a PP has said you end up with only the richer kids getting the benefits of a diagnosis.