AFL and APP

[deadbeatdad]

Do private schools do AFL in their schools?

What does APP mean?

Why do some schools seemingly spend entire lessons teaching the students the marking scheme?

Assessing Pupil's Progress

Privat schools wouldn't have to.

Time is spent so pupils understand how they are being assessed - you can blame the gov't for the number of targets, but there are a lot of skills in English, say, when you break down what they are being taught to do in reading and writing.

Sorry - just got to do this: private

Maintained schools don't have to use APP either, it isn't statutory.

Personally, I think AFL is quite manageable and can help children progress and teachers know what the children have understood mind you i seem to do it mostly in observed lessons. APP is another matter entirely

Thank you. But what does APP involve.

Did you see Dunford's comments today that assessement is driving the teaching rather than the other way round.

In my day, we weren't taught to mechanistically stick in a connective here and a sub-clause there, but learnt write reasonably intelligently.

It really is a distraction from education; isn't it

I know what you mean about assessment driving the teaching. DS1 in Y6 was getting marked down for writing because he didn't put in enough sophisticated punctuation. The children were told to go back through their writing to see where they could add in brackets, parenthetic commas, semi-colons etc to get extra marks. Daft.

That's madness Singersgirl but I would say that situation is caused by target setting rather than assessments.

Interestingly the fashion in writing - for work purposes anyway, seems to be taking a minimalist approach, very much steering away from cluttered punctuation. Dh (who works at Board level) will only insert a comma where absolutely necessary - often just to satisfy the lawyers - he's had one or two very hotly contested commas .

It is parents' evening time again and again I am left baffled by the APP stuff. Can anyone tell me if there is a website that tells you what it all means? My dd's scores range from 3 to 6, she is yr 7, what should she be getting? and why don't schools decode this stuff on the reports????

You may have more luck asking this on secondary - Y7 is past primary age.

thanks

3 to 6 probaby means level 3 to level 6. I teach year 6 so often look to year 7 objectives for the bright ones. Y6 expected levels are 3, 4 and 5, for less able (3), on target (4) and more able (5). In year 7 the would be pushing them on towards level 6. Level 3 would be considered very low for Y7 by the end of the year.
Hope this helps.
Oh and don't panic if you have some level 3's, speak to the teachers about how you can support DC in those areas.

And if the 3s are in subjects not studied at primary eg. French or Spanish, then it's actually pretty good! Good schools will provide students with level descriptors in their exercise books

APP will at many schools involve only 5-6 children in each class. The teacher would pick children to represent the range of levels in the class. You have a grid for each child, if a child is a secure lvl2, you get teh grid for lvls 2-3. Next comes a fun paper collecting game where the teacher has to gather evidence for the various statements on the grid (really tricky for reading I find, where you don't always have much written work). The teacher highlights the statements that corresponds to the evidence. This often involves lots of cross referencing, photo copying and note making. Evidence and grid stuck in a nicely organised folder and a sublvl decided on. Folder then gets trotted out at the request of senior team or various inspectors.

Supposedly this will teach us teachers to make accurate judgements of levels