End of year school reports

[Over40]

What do you expect to see in your DC's end of year report. Our school recently asked parents this question to try and improve what is currently sent out (although I think it's pretty good!), and the responses that came back were so varied it makes me wonder whether it is possible to have one format that delivers against everyones expectations.
Just interested in others opinion and your experiences.

sbw, I feel very sorry for the poor little buggers at the bottom of the list!

But I guess the teachers aren't having to write 4 A4 sheets of comments for their class of 27 12 children....

Just to blow the state/private divide

the comments i was making about the only positive banal comments are from when/still at private school max 20 in a class usually they had less.

the gradings and information are from state (although senior) but with 30 in a class.

Minthumbug - we got the info that sawbridge got in our reports when I was at school (state school). I loved it because I was a girlie swot but it was stopped soon after I left. I think it was felt pointless to know if you are 26th/27th or 3rd/4th in the top set/2nd top whatever as everyone in the top set should get an A*/A, second set A/B and so on down the school. I think it caused a lot of upset.

Parents want to know about

behaviour
effort
how they are doing compared to the average.

No?

my friend, an NQT for reception class, has been writing her reports, they're only a paragraph for each child but she's working really hard to put personal observations on them and not use stock phrases. Good on her I say.

but she has a distinct feeling that a couple will be coming back to haunt her, if she's been 'too honest'

So when do people tend to get them from school then?

We get ours the last week of term.

Makes the advice at the on the covering letter "please contact your childs teacher to discuss the report if you have any queries" laughable.

Don't most parents know where their child sits ability wise in a class without having it written it down for them in ink?
I 'm a primary teacher and I despair at children being levelled or such weight being attached to these levels, when at this age children develop at such varying rates anyway.I know my daughter struggles in maths and is below average without a teacher telling me. perhaps being a teacher helps but any sensible parent must have similar knowledge of their own offspring. And yes i do feel we write a lot of unnecessary tripe to fill a box. As someone else mentioned, back in the day when reports were a lot more minimal they were somehow more meaningful.

A few years ago a teacher I job-shared with devised an 'attitudes to learning' grid that we ticked always/sometimes/never for each of the comments which included things such as 'follows adults' instructions', 'is a keen and enthusiastic member of the class' etc. The parents liked it as it gave them a quick summary of how their child was in class so we could use the personal comment bit to write something properly personal.

We also included a cover sheet of everything we'd covered that year (but parents who'd read our newsletters knew already, it was more useful for the children who were regularly moving school) and proper teacher assessment levels, a comment about how this compared to national expectations and then the useful bits about strengths and areas the child needed to work on for next year.

We didn't do a cut and paste thing because that wouldn't have worked or been any use to anyone. We also both write honest reports along the lines of 'in order to make the most of his time in secondary school X needs to remember that lesson time is for learning, not for playing tag'. Oh, and we didn't write lots to fill boxes...we resized the boxes to fit what we thought was important.

Speaking for myself, I find it impossible to work out where DS is relative to the others in his class. He hasn't a clue because he never sees the work set for the other children who are not at his table for the subject and the teacher won't tell.
I suppose it doesn't really matter because its where he is relative to all the other children his age across the country that matters, not just the handful in his class. I think that's what the government targets are supposed to tell you, but I can't work out if they are set low (so the government can claim good performance) or high or at the median?