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Introduction to Insight Essentials

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 […]

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Breaking the scales

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, […]

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The Nuclear Option

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 […]

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Assessment by numbers

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 […]

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Converting 2018 KS2 scaled scores to standardised scores

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 […]

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Making expected progress?

’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 […]

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Trust

Here’s a thing. In conversations with senior leaders both online and in the real world, I often get asked about restricting access to data for teaching staff or even locking down tracking systems entirely. This seems to take two broad themes: 1) Limiting a teacher’s access to data that relates only to those pupils for […]

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The Progress Delusion

I recently spoke to a headteacher of a primary school judged by Ofsted to be ‘requiring improvement’. The school has been on an assessment journey in the last couple of years, ditching their old tracking system with its ’emerging-developing-secure’ steps and expected progress of three points per year (i.e. levels), in favour of a simpler […]

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