secondary school reports - how does your school set out their reports?

[Ladyemem]

Really annoyed about how my sons school does their school reports.

They basically have columns with numbers 1,2,3 or 4 for (excellent,very good satisfactory and inadequate for behaviour, effort, homework etc then another column giving their attainment level and target level. then another column with likelihood of them achieving their target.

NO words on it at all. So nothing personal to my son written on it at all.
Is this the same for all secondary schools?

For the half termly orders it's like that, but the end of year report is:

Bla bla bla about what they've been doing that year (standard thing for every pupil)

then a paragraph or two about ds's particular progress (or lack of!), strengths and weaknesses and what he needs to work on.

then the year tutor and head of year put a couple of lines in (just general encouragement usually).

Non-selective comprehensive...

We get three termly reports every year.

Two are interim and designed as your are. We then have tutor/parents evening one week after one of these reports are issued.

One report is a full report and has all the same information plus a personalised set of comments including one from tutor and another from year head. We have a full parents evening a week after the full report is received.

We get one every half term as you describe, at state secondary, and one in the summer with comments for each subject, most likely grade, grade working towards, and effort and behaviour. Plus general comments from HoY and form tutor.

End of year has commentary - a para a subject. Also ratings which are given quarterly: under performing over performing or progressing as planned.

They do have quarterly review days with parent and form teacher along with 2 patents evenings a year.

Mixed comp - DD had a couple of those type of report sheets with NC levels for each term plus a target level, and grades for attitude and presentation AFAICR! We also got a ring bound report after the main exams with a page for each subject giving levels, progress and targets, a lot of waffle about coverage and some personalised comments for each subject and an overall comment from the form tutor and HoY.

State comp - in KS3 we get a report per year with (for each subject) type of class (eg. mixed ability/ set 2 etc.) grades for effort/ behaviour/ homework, current NC levels, exam mark and average mark for the class. Also, each teacher can give 'congratulations' or not for their subject.
No written comment at all - until the end of year 9, when each subject teacher and the form teacher write a few sentences.
At KS4, we get a report every term giving Predicted GCSE grades - no comments.

State comp. We get a similar report to yours in the Autumn and Spring terms and then the same with a couple of lines from each subject teacher in the Summer.

Yep. Same here. Erm, Lady, as somebody who has written many, many reports in her life, I have to tell you that it is unlikely you have ever had more than about a sentence of 'personal comments'. It is actually very rare that you want or need to say anything meaningfully personal about a particular student as regards their education. Children do tend to fit into categories in terms of reports....thus you cut and paste.

When I used to have to write reports in the old days, I developed about ten statements and then cut and pasted back and forth between them. This was what everybody did.

The reports that you're getting will have been designed by the senior leadership team to reflect the key pieces of information a parent actually wants/needs to hear. Most of the reports that I used to check through by other members of staff (and me) were just a load of waffle designed to fill a space.

And, blimey, can you imagine how long it would take? I teach almost 200 students! It takes long enough just filling in the numbers, believe me.

We don't get any target level information, we just get an effort grade 1-4 and then Attainment A to C+, for the summer report there is a brief comment as well. There is a document on the school website that is supposed to explain the attainment grades but except for maths it doesn't explain how grades correlate with levels. Is there a requirement for state schools to provide information on target levels because we're not getting that?

The OP describes what sounds like an interim report, but even in my kids school, each subject has a target comment. A full description is given in "full" reports.

DD's report is exactly like your son's ladyemem. Her school has over 1500 pupils and I don't suppose the teachers have time to write anything.

It's not as fluffy at secondary is it?
Ours get one like that the first two terms then a long one in the summer term with comments and a page for the tutor.

We get one report a year (usually half way through) with comments and then 4 times a year we get all pupil tracking grids showing progress/ levels over the year and then attitude to learning and homework on a 1-5 scale.

They also have another section with codes for celebrations and concerns.

We get three reports year, two are data reports with the Behaviour scores, target and current attainment and one is a full report with comments. We also get a form tutors report once a year.

Timings vary - Y7 full report at end, Y8 it was half way though. Y9 was in November, before choosing options.

Don't know about KS4 as we haven't been there yet!