School Data Updates

Standardised tests are extremely useful. They provide an external reference of a pupil’s attainment, indicating whether it is below, above or broadly in line with national average; and give an idea of how pupils are progressing relative to other pupils nationally. They can help us understand what pupil’s do and don’t know whilst providing important…

The release of reception baseline framework in February has understandably generated a lot of buzz (and debate!) about the nature and purpose of the assessment, and has resulted in questions, particularly from early years teachers, about how progress will be measured in future. Much of the confusion seems to stem from the use of the…

Insight, like many tracking systems, allows users to record assessments against individual learning objectives. Schools using the full version of Insight can set up their own lists of objectives for any subject or intervention, and these can be edited, deleted or added to as required by the user. It is important to note that overall…

One of the outcomes of the primary assessment consultation is the removal of statutory teacher assessment in reading and maths at key stage 2, which comes into effect this year. It is important to note that there will not be a complete removal of teacher assessment in these subjects – pupils working below the standard…

Someone tweeted me recently to ask what I thought about a school setting an expected rate of progress of 4 scale points from pupils’ KS1 test scores. A pupil scoring 100 on their KS1 test would therefore be expected to achieve 104 in their KS2 test, and – according to the source – they are,…

I guess we’ve been building up to this. As Sean Harford announced at a recent conference that, under the new Ofsted framework, inspectors will “ignore all tracking data”, delegates experienced a collective jaw-drop moment. We sat up like Meerkats, alert, turning to one another in bewilderment with silent questions on our lips: “what the….?”. (This…

I once sat in on a series of demos of primary school tracking systems for a large MAT. At lunchtime the CEO – a secondary head by trade – sat with his head in his hands and asked: “how have we reached the point where we have so little faith in teachers’ judgement that we…

Many schools are using standardised tests from the likes of NFER, GL and Rising Stars to monitor attainment and progress of pupils, and to predict outcomes; and yet there is lot of confusion about how standardised scores relate to scaled scores. The common assumption is that 100 on a standardised test (eg from NFER) is…

2018 version of ASP summary template free to download here. Some tweaks on last year’s template – now takes account of time series and 3 year average. Feel free to modify, copy and share. Just credit the source and please download it first before attempting to complete it (it will open in Word online. To…

’Expected progress’ was a DfE accountability measure until 2015. Inspectors must not use this term when referring to progress for 2016 or current pupils. Ofsted Inspection Update, March 2017. It’s an odd phrase, expected progress, as it seems to have two meanings. First, there is the expectation of the teacher, which is based on an in-depth…