Would you expect to have any personalised comments on a school report?

[Neolara]

Dd is in Year 9. With 2 days of school to go, we have not yet received a school report. In the last year, the school has introduced an online portal where parents can see how well their kids are doing. It includes numerical values that correspond to target, anticipated and current gcse grades. You can also see if your child has been sanctioned and their attendance. I think it gives a pretty good snapshot of where my dc is at any one point. However, there are no comments, just numbers in columns. No narrative about the children or detail of any kind. Nothing about the kids character or social relationships.

Given that we haven't yet received a report, it has just occurred to me that the school may not be sending out reports this year. They may think the online portal is sufficient. I was certainly anticipating something a bit more personalised. Do you think a report without any personalised comments is OK? Or is this just normal these days?

But if your kid is consistently getting well above class average in tests, then that’s a good sign. If they are consistently getting test scores around the same level as the class genius (kids know who the brainy kids are) then that’s very positive. If they are getting 30% and the class average is 60% then that’s something to be concerned about. If they are holding position in top set maths then they’re doing better than someone in a numeracy support group.

But tbh, that is meaningless without knowing setting information inside out. Or indeed how well the whole year does against national averages.

I'm actually beginning to feel increasingly gaslighted by the whole education system.

And if teachers 'make up' grades what hope is there for children to exceed initial expectations? There will be zilcho movement between sets as every assessment is completely prejudiced.

It’s only going to get worse: there are fewer teachers in the profession and the number of students coming into secondary schools is increasing rapidly. No one has any idea who will teach these children, to be honest. If your child has a teacher - the same teacher for the whole year - you’re one of the lucky ones.

People are being made deputy heads before they’re thirty -schools are so desperate to hang on to good people.

There will be zilcho movement between sets as every assessment is completely prejudiced.

No, teachers may be forced to make up grade boundaries and assign them to assessments, but the raw scores mean that a kid can still perform better on an assessment than the set above (assuming they do the same assessment), or consistently perform at the top of the class.

assuming they do the same assessment

Big assumption.

The personal stuff all comes at Parents' evening.

Or if they are particularly concerned they would contact you. You could also request a meeting of you are worried about anything.

Primary teachers spend hours doing reports that are a waste of time, IMO. Secondary ones are better

Thank you all for your thoughts and comments. Seems just numbers with no or limited comments is the norm in secondary. (I actually used to teach secondary in my pre-kids life and so do understand the burden of report writing.)

I think it would have been helpful for the school to have explicitly told parents that they were no longer send out "old style" school reports and that parents should refer to the online portal to find out about their kids progress. I'm pretty sure lots of parents will still be expecting a traditional report as their has been no communication to lead parents to think otherwise. I'm also pretty sure that lots of parents will be mystified by what the numbers mean.

Primary reports are quite varied, in my experience. We have been told that, now the volume of writing has been curtailed, we should ensure that what we do write is personalised and that someone should be able to easily recognise who it's about if the name was removed.
That said, I've still seen some shockingly bland and generalised ones around, not least from Year 6, where I should have thought it even more important to give a rounded and comprehensive summary of the child's progress and attitude.

I teach 375 different kids each week in secondary, would love to only have 100/150 !!
Just inputting the numbers 6 x a year takes hours. I do have to write a report for my tutor group but only a paragraph each.

We have a portal. Reports every 1/2 so 6 per year, then a 16 page end of year report which we had about a month again via email, with a text on the portal to say it had been emailed out.

ours has a portal and we get 3 a year and 1 parents evening