Our assessment serves as crucial feedback for children, teachers, parents, and school leaders. It enables acknowledgment, analysis, and review of achievements and learning progress in relation to expected standards. These assessments inform both immediate and long-term planning.
Key outcomes of our assessment include:
Children: Enhancing learners’ awareness of their strengths, identifying areas for improvement, and outlining next steps for extending their learning.
Teachers: Providing detailed insights into children’s’ achievements to guide future learning strategies, lesson planning, and teaching methods.
Parents and Carers: Receiving regular progress reports on their child’s performance against expectations, fostering collaborative efforts among teachers, children, and parents to support learning and elevate standards.
School Leaders and Governors: Offering actionable information to inform decisions for improving standards, learning environments, and principles of teaching within the school.
External Agencies and Partners: Providing evidence of the school’s comprehensive understanding of its children and commitment to maintaining high educational standards, preparing them to be ‘secondary ready’ by the end of their time at primary school.
Teachers assess on a daily basis to monitor progress during lessons. Additionally, there are formal statutory assessment procedures and examinations designed to gauge attainment levels against national standards. See ‘How we assess progress’ tab for further information.
Good assessment involves paying close attention to details and using analytical skills. Through direct instruction, teachers use modelling and facilitate high quality discussions. They ask questions, interpret answers, observe behaviours, and note responses to tasks. Our teachers know when to step in if needed and use appropriate scaffolds to collate a range of evidence that enables them to understand a learner’s strengths and move them on in areas they need to develop.
Regular opportunities for retrieval practice are built into our curriculum to ensure children draw on their background knowledge and make connections with new learning. It also enables teachers to identify any gaps in prior learning that need to be addressed.
Feedback and ‘next step marking’ is an essential part of our ‘plan, teach, assess’ cycle and children are involved in both written and verbal forms to enable them to recognise their next steps and be able to take them. Children are encouraged to explain their thinking in order to deepen their learning.
