Volunteer carrying out reading age assessments

[PKH]

Hi everyone!

I wondered what your opinion is on this...
It has come to my attention that the year 3 teacher at my son's school is allowing a parent helper to carry out the reading age assessments with the children. The parent helper has previously disclosed to me how severe her own dyslexia is, and how she is technically functionally illiterate.

It doesn't sit quite right with me that a parent helper is being allowed to carry out reading age assessments (unsupervised I might add), especially when she has told me how significant her own struggles are with reading accurately.

Surely the school is required to have somebody with some level of training carrying out the assessments? It makes me worry slightly how accurate the assessments are in the school...

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

I think a parent helper is probably quite able to understand the kid needs to be able to do X and Y and if they can then they are Z level.
The concern would be if she's able to know if they're reading the words correctly
I've have been inclined to gently enquire oh that's sounds a lot of responsibility, did you have much training? Are you finding it OK given your dyslexia? etx

I wouldn’t be best impressed. Does the teacher know she’s functionally illerate?

I wouldn't be happy with this. Reading assessments should be carried out by teaching staff or HLTA/TAs.

However, they are incredibly time consuming and school staff struggle to fit things like this in alongside everything else so may feel this helper is capable.

Well if she is actually functionally illiterate I can’t see how she can hear children and know if they’re reading accurately, let alone support their sounding out of difficult vocabulary and then write in reading records. Very strange.

Time consuming and then some. If a volunteer didn't do this, most likely no-one would.

But this volunteer doesn't sound appropriate. Very odd. I wonder if she's told the school about her reading difficulties.

From a volunteer management perspective, volunteers shouldn't be carrying out a role that belongs in the remit of paid staff - their role should be complementary but there should be clear boundaries between paid and unpaid roles (obviously different if in a grassroots or community group where there aren't paid staff).

I'm sure you don’t know all the details of her reading ability. It’s great that the school have someone with literacy difficulties working there-inclusive employment and all that. I’d just keep out of it.

I would raise the issue with the teacher tbh.
School’s I used to work in did have some volunteers doing these things, however they had relevant experience.

I completely agree with you that it’s great that the school are being proactive with their inclusivity. My concern is when it comes specifically comes to the children’s assessments.

I am aware that the parent hasn’t informed the teacher of her learning difficulties. Though she has told me in quite some detail about what she is and isn’t able to do within literacy. She is keen for the school not to know.

Right. That is very tricky…

Thank you for your comment.
Every other class has either the teacher or TA carrying out assessments, and on the whole the school are excellent at continually assessing the children etc...

I was just rather surprised when I heard which volunteer it was assessing the children within this one year group, and wondered what other people’s thought were.

Very amateur and breaches GDPR.

Not tricky at all.
For goodness sake you really need to inform the school. This is so unfair for the children.

I agree it’s unfair on the children and needs to be flagged, but it puts the OP in a tricky personal position, as it will be obvious she will be the one who let the school know. But the school can handle it appropriately, without necessarily even letting the volunteer know, and move her to somerging else.

Are you sure it's not a computer based assessment and she's not just sitting with the kids or looking at the outputs?
DS has regular tests that give a reading band.

Are you sure it's not a computer based assessment and she's not just sitting with the kids or looking at the outputs?
DS has regular tests that give a reading band

This is highly likely. The children will all be reading the same short texts (that’s how standardised tests are done) so even if not computer based, the volunteer will be very familiar with the texts and therefore able to identify errors, hesitations, speed etc. It’s not remotely like listening to children read normally.

You should always take the results with a pinch of salt anyway. These tests are a blunt instrument and you need to put them in the context of your holistic knowledge of the child who could just be having a good or bad day, amongst lots of other external factors affecting the test results.

It's probably a really prescribed step by step assessment that the teacher will use alongside their knowledge of their child and other assessment tools to give the child a level in reading. No good teacher would take a reading age assessment and base the level on that one solo assessment. So it would just be a small part of any level a child would get.

It also doesn't go against GDPR because parent/volunteer readers are very common and even reading with a child once or twice will give you an idea of whether they're behind/on track/working above or not. Plus they'll know what book band they're on and can figure it out from that!