What's taken into account for end of year report

[giveacatabowl]

Hi,

My oldest is in year 1. I am curious, and hope someone can share, how are end of year reports written?

Are they based on notes the teacher has been taking throughout the year, some specific observation to assess attainment/ struggles, or based on what's demonstrated in class in the last few weeks?

Thanks!

Depends on your school….we had ticks on a table of achievements or more work or as expected…as a report to support our kid..it was feeble.

I’ve just written my y1 reports. I give a personal comment, then a reading, writing & maths comment. Each is personal to the child.

The personal comment is based on everything I know about them from spending 30 hours a week with them through the year.

The subject comments are more about what they are doing currently.

@5childrenand thank you

I write what comes to mind thinking about the child. I'm writing about their abilities in the summer term though. I tend to talk about the same themes in the personal comment: friendships, independence, organisation, homework, sports events etc.

Ours have pupil voice in them so usually a star moment in the year for them and then will often say the ways they prefer to work and also comment on any extra responsibilities they have had. Each are very individual to the child! Is there a specific part of your child’s report that you’re unsure of?

@giveacatabowl Quite a few schools use a computer program and reports are not very original! They add a few personal comments but a lot is achievement and assessment of progress. Never seen much about sport or art or drama. Behaviour, independence and what to build on might be included.

Comment for maths, English and reading and then another comment for all the rest of the subjects, giving a basic overview of what's been covered, got they've progressed through the year and whether the child enjoyed it. Finally, a comment about general attitude and behaviour in class and any targets for next year.

Ctrl+c; ctrl+v and change names, pronouns and some details that relate to that individual child.

They can feel a bit formulaic. There's a group of quiet fairly studious girls in DDs class who all got pretty much the same report when we compared them. But I'm sure they get hardly any time to write them and just do the best they can.

They are all fairly similar. It’s not like you can say anything bad now so everything is coached in language. The individual section at the end should be individual to the child though but lots of times even then a lot of sentences are similar between children because it may be true of a few people.

my personal feeling is all academics should have a tick box and something to work on and a lovely individual comment. Because in the end that’s what is important.

We haven't got the report yet.

Your dc school sounds amazing!

Thanks for the replies!

Just thinking about attainment/ targets. If the child is not assessed individually how does a teacher know to tick the right box for achievements. Thinking about quieter kids, for example, who would not participate in class as much.
Also if they didn't get something in February, when it was being covered (say, Mass in maths), may be they completely get it by now..

And with regards to friendships - don't kids get watched by midday supervisors, etc. at playtime?
Hard for the teacher to observe social skills during a lesson time?

Does the next year's teacher have access to the kids reports from September? Or are they only for the parents and have no other bearing.

So many questions- sorry. Just pondering really.

This is what I’d do as a teacher but my sons report is fairly similar in structure! We are in Scotland

No I disagree completely about friendships OP. The teacher will have a very good idea about how a child gets along socially - you observe a huge amount of it in the classroom. Teachers also do break duty (not in Scotland).

Obviously if you teach something midway through the year, the child might not have understood but now has the capacity too but there isn't time to revisit everything. The point is, at that moment in time, they either could or couldn't achieve an objective that the teacher thought was age appropriate for that stage in the year. It's unusual for a child to get that much better at something like telling the time, for example, or graph work, without significant parent input though. Arithmetic is covered continually so that will be assessed in the summer.

Re formulaic as some pps have said, there's only so many ways to say a child works hard, answers lots of questions, can help themselves to resources independently etc. I literally don't copy and paste at all as don't find it any quicker and have never worked in a school with software (I don't actually think many primaries can afford such a thing!) but I imagine if you compared say high achieving girls, their reports would say similar things in a slightly different way.

I don't get any extra time at all to write reports. They take me 0.5-1 hour per child, depending on the school. It's a lot of work.

@flipper that's super helpful! Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Where I was a governor we had software for reports and many schools did. Also software for entering assessment data. So lots of info can be gathered and used for reports to parents and governors. (Names removed for governors) There obviously are personal comments added but these reports are very general and the assessment data held by the school is the detail. There are of course parents evenings to talk about progress and many schools offer a post report meeting too if required.

Each child is assessed individually several times through the year and their written work and contributions to the lessons also help the teacher build a very good picture of them, their abilities and strengths and areas for development and their interests. You get to know each child really well throughout the year.

Teachers don't usually comment on each individual area of learning for each subject so it would generally only be mentioned if they didn't understand, for instance, mass at all despite revisiting it several times.

You get to know friendships and social abilities through how they interact with each other during the lessons as it's not all just sitting at the desk working independently in silence. Remember that there's pe/games, group work, drama and dance and music etc and the teachers will usually have at least one break duty a week. They do tell you things as well, for instance if they played a certain game at playtime and xxxxx kept doing something wrong or yyyyy did really well.

Teachers talk to each other and have a bit of a handover discussion and information is shared between the current and new class teacher before the end of the year. No, they don't usually swap parents' reports but all of the information within them are made known to the new teacher.

@MyMachineAndMe ah, great - thank you so much!

@MyMachineAndMe , interesting that teacher from previous year pass on to the new teacher but how are bias avoided? If DC is talkative or shy, if they read different books at home in the summer ie. Chapter books which wasn’t the case in summer term. The kid that learn their timetables in the summer and not noted for doing so before.
Just thinking how it would work the next school year if teacher in the new year group takes previous teacher notes and not make their own judgement call. Or do the teacher move with the year group?

Bias is avoided where possible but remember that you get to know the children in other classes anyway because you meet them in assemblies or at playtime or walking through the corridors or even at after school clubs. No, they don't generally move up with the children.

What a child might have learnt over the summer is assessed at the first assessment point in the Autumn term. Chapters in books doesn’t really matter. Parents set greater store in this. Clearly the maths curriculum might involve tables. Dc are assessed on the curriculum. It’s not a race either. Consolidating knowledge and application are important.

There are handover meetings between teachers. All assessment data is recorded but who Dc should be grouped with is obviously important as is setting the right challenge of work.

I handed mine in on Friday. Subject comment for each subject with attainment and effort grades. Foundation subjects are less personalised, core subjects more so but cover the same main areas, eg tables recall, 4 operations, shape in maths for each child.

I then comment on behaviour and anything that will need ongoing support along with their favourite part of the year, activities they enjoy and what they are most proud of.