report writing

[monet24]

Report writing arghhhhhh. Oh all good plans! I try to be really good honest. I have planned to get up and do some each day before, set myself a daily target and let's just say it has gone out the window as quickly as the speed of sound. Amazing what else is so more appealing .
Defrosting the freezer.
Sorting out the kitchen cupboards
Tidying my daughters tip of a bedroom!

I will start them tomorrow honest

I have four classes (total of 56 students), so am figuring an hour per class tops. I can be a report writing machine!

Mercifully, my school has reduced reports down to grades and a paragraph...happy days.

We'd call that an interim report, not a full one.

...happy days...

My school have done that, Doowrah, three grades and the paragraph only has 1000 characters.

Very sensible at primary I think although our paragraph is open to interpretation.Even the head has cut her capacious text box down to a line or two...fair play.

1000 characters? Mine are 1000 words each, give or take. That's 30 000 words I've written....

1000 characters is going to make for very odd reports. This is the first time out and I can see problems.

I would be careful with statement banks. We had interim reports last term and siblings in year 1 and year 5 had exactly the same reports. Probably says more about our school than anything really .....

Primary NQT here so this is my first year of writing reports. I am pretty much finished but I have a horrible feeling I've been too honest. I've stupidly just looked at what their teacher last year wrote and to be honest, some of them seem to be written about completely different children

What is the point of the coded comments? How are parents supposed to know what they mean, especially if they have English as a second language.

I have done 5 and mostly because I am bloody resenting every second of it.

I am a supply teacher. I chose to do supply as I'm studying for an M.ed and am going through an SEN tribunal about my son's secondary placement. I deliberately started supply to concentrate on that.

I have ended up on long term supply in year 2 (because of a story too long to go into)

I have done 2 parent's evenings, endless evenings of marking and assessing, pupil progress meetings and now reports - and I am paid not a penny more than when I was going in to a school, teaching, marking and leaving. These have been hanging over me all half term (while I wrote an assignment and organised witnesses for the tribunal) I am so pissed off with them that I get cross every time I start and end up stopping again. I am not being paid for this week either. At his is all the crap bits of supply (pay) without the benefits (lack of responsibility)

I know it's my own fault to a degree, but that makes it more annoying, not less!

Aaaaaargh. They just take so long!

What is the point of the coded comments? How are parents supposed to know what they mean, especially if they have English as a second language.

Because if your write 'your child is a badly behaved horror' you tend to get told off.

We have 700 characters and a grade for each child. That's it. It's great; there's no evidence that long reports are useful. Now I've got early UCAS things to write... Argh!

My dcs are older now, I hope I didn't miss the hidden meanings. Presumably behavioural issues would be raised at parents' evenings.

From a parent to a teacher can I just say I do read the reports and often think what a ball ache it must be to right them.

I'd love a straight down the line no bullshit report!

Lifeissweet - you need to renegotiate.

When I did long term supply for a term, I was paid £40 extra a day with very clear understanding that I couldn't do staff meetings and would often need to leave by 4 to pick up my children. I didn't really want to do long term supply for those reasons but decided to do it after those terms were worked out.

Schools and agencies will get away with what they can. Another long term supply at the same school than me was getting £60 a day less than me and was still expected to do all staff meetings.

Also after 12 weeks your package should make you more in line with your previous earnings/rights.

Google - supply teachers after 12 weeks. There's some downloadable documents there.

I would much rather do a short, graded report with a personal statement about attitude to learning etc and then meet with parents for 15 mins to discuss and set a couple of targets from that for next year. Much more useful than reams of paper that may or may not be read or understood.

I teach my subject across the entire school and have 14 classes of reports to write... Have done 2 classes so far, and they're all due in a fortnight...

Thank you Round Table. I will see if I can have a word with the agency.

I did call and ask when I did parents' evening. I said that I was staying until 7 for 2 days in a row, shouldn't I be paid more than my usual daily rate?

And they said no. Long term supply means doing everything the class teacher would usually do - at the usual daily rate.

Interesting that you managed to negotiate something else.

Good luck life. Mine was worked out from m6 as I was ups 2 in a previous life. Then divided by 195 days and that was my daily rate.

Some agencies are terrible it seems.

So fed up with reports. We've been writing them since Easter in our school. Each child's report is approx 2500 words, covering all subjects. They take hours. And then we get the pleasure of swapping them with a colleague and proofreading theirs!

We use an online assessment system that then generates our reports based on the comments we've logged through the year.

Yes to the grammar being terrible. 'Has nearly learned to', 'Is almost able to'. It's been the same for several years so they aren't improving anything.

So on top of writing general comments (and after 20 years of knowing what I prefer to write I fall into using the same patterns of phrases that I know reflect the child easily) and writing about 500 words per child, we then need to proof read the generated comments.

My class's reports run to 200 pages and over 70,000 words if you include everything we put in.

Madness.

70,000 words! My phd thesis was 80,000 and that took 6 years