Is this Y7 Report Acceptable Standard

[SingleDadStruggling]

I got my daughter's end-of-Y7 report. It's a 'much of muchness' and tells me nothing, hardly worth the effort in producing it.

An FFT20 Benchmark score, a progress comment and an Effort score (1 highest 4 lowest). Nothing else.

FFT score - no idea if that's her score (then what's the average score) or if that's what the average score is (then what's her score) and are these scores against national, LEA or school averages?

A progress of 'expected on everything, which tell me nothing, expect 1 where shes below but no indication what or what she needs to do to improve (which happens to be her favourite lesson).

An 'effort' mark

And no written comments....

Is this normal now? When I taught (secondary school for 18 years) I wrote 50-60 words on every kid on their reports.

This report tells me absolutely nothing about how my daughter is doing, or what she needs to do to improve.

Pretty standard for a secondary school report in my experience. Did the Geography teacher say anything at parents evening? If not I would be emailing them about why progress is below expected in geography. Other than that she's obviously just cracking on at expected level so no areas of concern and nothing to do bit keep it up in year 8.

That's all we get. I also find there are multiple mistakes - a low effort number that the teacher claims was supposed to be a high one, or a homework percentage automatically created by the system doesn't reflect all the homeworks the teacher failed to log as returned in class. I find it very poor as a parent, but understand that reports can easily end up being meaningless cut&paste style use of stock phrases.

We get a parent/teacher evening and ask a LOT of questions. I'm lucky we have always been able to attend parent/teacher evenings so far.

That’s all we get too. Useless.

That’s what I got 15-20 years ago when I was in school and what my sister got 5-10 years ago at a different secondary school. I teach primary and we write quite a bit on reports but I don’t think I’ve ever come across a secondary school teacher that does proper comments for any of theirs.

When my daughter was in Year 7, we would get an effort level (ranging from poor to excellent or something like that) and something between Consistently Below Expectations to Exceeding Expectations for her achievement level - both ranging between 5. Then there was also something to improve on for each subject - like revise more for tests, ask your teacher for help for subjects she struggled in. But majority of them just said maintain standards and performances. That was pretty much it - just stats, and no actual worded or personalised feedback whatsoever. A lot of the time, my DD said the results were completely unfair as she would receive good grades in subjects but her teacher would be useless and not check it properly and she'd end up with low achievement grades. She was also pretty quiet in class but always got the work done well and yet sometimes her acheivement level was affected by the effort level which makes no sense to me - she was getting the grades! Now she's at GCSE level and it's much more organised regarding grades obviously but still on personalised feedback until parents evening.

Yes this is pretty standard for year 7 and 8. At our school they start getting gcse target grades and performance against those from mid year 9 as they choose their GCSEs at the end of year 8.

The FFT20 benchmark grade is based on pupils like your DD who have taken GCSEs in the past.

For your DD, the grade is based on female pupils, born in the same month, who attended schools which made above average progress (hence 20th centile), and scored similarly on the SATs.

That’s absolutely standard - some different unhelpful data than others I’ve seen, but still same uselessness! It’s her third report though - did you expect something better?

"For your DD, the grade is based on female pupils, born in the same month, who attended schools which made above average progress (hence 20th centile), and scored similarly on the SATs".

I can not see how the majority of parents will understand this, so I question the point of adding it other than to obfuscate things. It just seems a pointless addition that just confuses the issue further.