Assessment

Our assessment practices provide information about children’s attainment and progress. They involve marking childrens’ work and providing written and oral feedback that identifies successes and the next steps for improvement and checking that they have responded to this feedback. We engage children in the whole assessment process by building self-assessment strategies into our teaching. We provide periodic summaries of attainment and progress through in-class tests, teacher assessment and the formal externally set tests. Good assessment requires attention to detail and analytical skill. It involves teachers in: asking questions and interpreting answers; observing behaviours and responses to tasks; knowing if and when to intervene; and drawing on a wide range of evidence to build up a picture of a child’s strengths and weaknesses.

What are schools and settings statutorily required to assess?

Teachers carry out day to day assessments and checks on childrens’ understanding and progress as part of their day to day teaching. Statutory, formal assessment procedures also exist to measure attainment against national standards. Our children’s’ achievements are compared nationally with all those children of the same age and against schools in the local authority and in England. These formal assessments include:

• The Phonics Screening Test at the end of Year 1
  • It assess children’s’ phonic skills as part of early reading
• End of Key Stage 1 (Year2)
  • We draw on tests and teacher assessments to help us to assess the progress children are making in reading, writing and mathematics. Our teachers also assess children’s’ achievements in speaking and listening and science.
• End of Key Stage 2 (Year 6)
  • Children take statutory tests that assess whether children achieve national expectations in reading, writing and mathematics. We also assess childrens’ progress over the key stage.

What are the key features of our assessment procedures?

Our assessment procedures give attention to helping children to meet or exceed national expectations and achieve the highest standards they can over each key stage of their learning. The National Curriculum sets out what our children are to learn but we decide how we assess our children’s’ attainment and progress over the key stage. Our assessment procedures:

• Make clear to all children our expectations in terms of learning behaviours
  • Set out the attitudes and behaviours we expect of children when in the classroom
  • Show them how work is to be presented in their books and establish that any unacceptable work is to be done again to the standard required by Robson House
  • Tell children that they will succeed and acknowledge how and when they are becoming successful learners to establish self-confidence and good learning behaviours
• Share learning objectives with children
  • Share learning objectives at the beginning of a phase of learning – a new topic, a week or a lesson as appropriate, and highlight them throughout the lesson using language that children understand
  • Use these objectives as the basis for listening, questioning and feedback during the learning activities
  • Use this on-going assessment to inform planning and to make any adjustments to the learning objectives for the week and future weeks
  • Refer children back to earlier learning objectives to demonstrate and review progress over time
• Help children to recognise the standards they are to achieve and have already achieved
  • Share and discuss children’s’ work explaining how and why they have met the standards expected
  • Give children clear success criteria that relate to the learning objectives
  • Set clear and shared expectations about the presentation of work and model how this is to be achieved with examples to set out standards
• Involve children in self-assessment and peer-assessment
  • Provide time for children to read teachers’ feedback and assess how successfully they carried out the tasks set
  • Give children opportunities to talk in pairs or small groups about what they have learned, what they have found difficult and what they might do differently to improve
  • Ask children to explain the steps in their thinking and justify their decisions and reasoning
  • Model with children the language of assessment that they can use to review their own and their peer’s learning and to identify next steps in learning
  • Establish a classroom ethos that enables a critical review of work to be undertaken that is seen as positive and not taken as any personal criticism
  • Engage the children in feedback through their responses to teachers’ comments and give children a short additional challenge to carry out that highlights what they have learned or what they need to correct
• Provide feedback which leads to children recognising their next steps and how to take them
  • Provide immediate oral feedback that helps children to identify mistakes, correct errors and take the next steps needed to move their learning on
  • Mark work sharing criteria, give feedback and identify next steps and targets
  • Acknowledge success and give positive feedback but avoid giving excessive or underserved praise
  • Ensure feedback is constructive and identifies what a child has done well, what needs to be done to improve, and how to do it
  • Identify the next steps for individual children and where appropriate for groups who can collaborate on a common approach to improvement or progress
• Involve teachers and children in reviewing and reflecting on assessment information
  • Identify carefully progressed steps in learning through the learning outcomes and success criteria to enable children to see their progress, thus building confidence and self-esteem
  • Use appropriate tasks that will provide us with quality assessment information by showing childrens’ thinking as well as the answer
  • Provide time for children and teachers to reflect on what they have learned and understood, and to identify where they still have difficulties
  • In the light of our assessments, evaluate teaching effectiveness and deployment of resources, learning tasks and organisation of learners, and make any adjustments to improve learning and raise standards

What procedures are in place to ensure assessment is rigorous?

We draw on the expertise that is available in Robson House, the Netley Campus, the Local Authority and nationally. We deploy monitoring and evaluation procedures and maintain a continuing overview of the whole in-school assessment through:

• Monitoring of childrens’ work
  • Provide time for subject leaders to carry out regular scrutiny of work to monitor pitch and expectations, coverage, marking and feedback in books and to review childrens’ progress with their teachers
  • Senior leaders carry out learning walks and lesson observations, review books and interview children about their learning and steps to improve
  • Senior leaders quality assure the strengths and weaknesses identified by staff following their own and subject leaders analyses of progress and standards in learning
• Moderation across the school
  • Provide time for key staff to carry out regular moderation of assessment and standards across the school
  • Set out clear expectations about marking and feedback to children that everyone puts into practice
  • Collect examples of children’s’ work that highlight standards, common mistakes and effective assessment and feedback that staff can refer to when undertaking moderation exercises
• Formal testing
  • Use past test papers and commercially produced materials to provide an independent check on how well children are doing and to compare outcomes against judgements made using a range of other assessment evidence
• Pupil progress meetings
  • Senior and middle leaders and teachers carry out a review of childrens’ progress in each class and identify the extent to which children are meeting expectations
  • Analyse on-going and past performance data against expectations to review and if necessary set new or revised targets for children to achieve and evaluate the effectiveness of intervention and assessment strategies
  • Use the outcomes of the meeting to target intervention for groups and to review the provision map for children across the ability spectrum
• Professional development and support
  • Key staff attend local and national meetings to learn more about assessment and reporting arrangements
  • Joint moderation meetings with Netley School provide an opportunity to ensure expectations are set at the right level and pitch
  • Local authority provision and support includes updated curriculum maps and schemes that highlight the key learning in core subjects and offer models for assessment
• Parents/carers meetings
  • Provide opportunities for parents/carers to discuss their child’s progress and to highlight any key issues that are affecting the child’s learning
  • Update parents on changes to the curriculum and assessment arrangements, and identify ways in which they can support their child’s learning
  • Discuss the assessments and comments in childrens’ books and statutory reports to parents
  • Provide workshops to help parents/carers develop skills to support their children’s learning