Assessment & Reporting

Assessment

Assessment is recognised as central to effective lesson planning, classroom practice and for the teaching and learning across the school. The purpose of formative assessment is to test students’ knowledge and inform future teaching. Assessments are carefully planned into the curriculum to enable teachers to measure students’ knowledge and skills, and to identify misconceptions. Therefore, assessment is an integral part of classroom practice.

When setting a piece of work, model answers or responses are shared and analysed with students. Teachers use a range of techniques and strategies, including modelling and shared writing to scaffold work, as well as regular low stakes testing. Teachers maximise opportunities for students to respond to feedback and allow students time to redraft, having addressed common misconceptions.

Summative assessments are used as part of the continuous formative assessment cycle, as well as being used as a tool to enable teachers to make reliable judgements about students’ learning. With both formative and summative assessments, students’ work is regularly moderated internally. This includes national data sets, exemplar material from examination boards and seeded scripts.

Performance data is not the sole measurement used; it is one metric used by teachers to help inform final assessment judgements about current and future outcomes. Assessment will always be led by the curriculum to support learning, rather than driven by designated data reporting points.

Students have three formal assessment points at the end of each term. These assessments test how well students retained the knowledge and skills from that term, as well as testing 25 per cent of the content they have previously been taught. An overview of the topics to be assessed are shared with parents and students at least half a term before the assessment to maximise students chances to prepare and excel. 

Reporting

Reports are sent to parents at the end of each term. These reports will reflect the academic progress of each student. At Key Stage Three, they will receive a percentage for each subject, which will demonstrate how much of the curriculum  they have retained. Along with their own percentage, we will report the cohort average to give some additional context to their marks. Along with academic outcomes, we also report important information regarding attendance, students’ engagement, as well as their achievement and behaviour points. 

At Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5, we report both a percentage and a notional grade 1-9 grade or U-A* at A Level (or BTech equivalents). All work is carefully marked and moderated, using specimen materials from exam boards. 

After receiving their reports, parents are invited to a progress review meeting with their child’s form tutor. As well as this, there are parent meetings with subject teachers once a year for students in Key Stage 3 and twice a year for students in Key Stages 4 and 5.