13 Assessment

Forest Park Primary School

At Forest Park, we use termly summative assessments from Rising Stars GAPS, NTS Reading and Maths assessments to provide data which is analysed using Insight. These assessments allow us to identify gaps in children’s learning for each cohort and enable teachers to address these gaps in their teaching. Writing is assessed using teacher judgements against year group expectations. To confirm these judgements, each cohort takes part in a national moderation with No More Marking once a year.

Kemball School

• Engagement Profile and Scale

Engagement is the single best predictor of successful learning for children with learning difficulties. Without engagement, there is no deep learning, effective teaching, meaningful outcome, real attainment or quality progress. The engagement profile and scale is a classroom tool that allows educators to focus on the engagement as a learner and create personalized learning pathways. Teachers are also able to easily identify how well pupils are progressing from previous assessment points from any time in their school career. Senior leaders are able to use the assessment systems to set realistic targets as well as being able to have in depth discussions about the children in each class as the assessment information is clear, concise and all stored on the same system. The systems also ensure that subject leaders have a clearer understanding about the standards in their subject in each class, year group and for the whole school.

Assessment

It prompts student-centered reflection on how to increase the learner’s engagement leading to deep learning.

Engagement is multi-dimensional, and encompasses awareness, curiosity, investigational, discovery, anticipation, persistance and initiation. By focusing on the five indicators of engagement, educators can ask themselves questions such as “how can I change the learning activity that stimulates her curiosity?” and “what can I change about this experience to encourage him to persist?”.

Oakhill Primary School

Clear, simple to use, assessment systems have been bought in and then adapted and developed for the whole school (Nursery - Year 6). These are used, first and foremost by teachers, to be able to identify how their own pupils are performing overall at set assessment points and then more specifically, how they are performing in the different strands of reading, writing and maths. In the case of EYFS, teachers are able to identify specific strengths and areas for development for individual children.

Watermill School

• Stepping Stones Assessment Tool

Stepping Stones is an assessment tool we have developed in-house. The assessment tool is divided up into five areas of development; Communication, Cognition, Understanding the World and Technology, Physical Development and PSE. There are four levels of assessment.

This tool is used to track progress for children who cannot access an adapted national curriculum (the Learning Pathways Curriculum); who have significant and severe learning disabilities and medical needs. Examples of assessment criteria range from Communication.1: ‘Notice stimuli? Turns towards a familiar sound’ to Communication.4: ‘Exerts autonomy in a variety of contexts e.g. the pupil will initiate an action to achieve a desired result’. Pupils who are working beyond Stepping Stone Level 4 access an adapted national curriculum through our Communication or Primary Pathway and attainment and progress is recorded via Clifton Emag.

• Clifton Emag

Our Teachers and Learning Support Practitioners have designed a curriculum that is heavily adapted from the National Curriculum and have developed a raft of strategies and approaches to working with children who fall well below the expected standard and age related expectations.

Clifton Emag is an online software package we use to track pupil progress for pupils who are working above Stepping Stone Level 4. Progress Points 4 to 12 set out the key assessment points for English and mathematics across all strands. This allows teachers and subjects leaders to track pupil progress, identify and work towards filling the gaps. Teachers use this tool to assist planning. We use Clifton Emag to track individual, class and whole school progress.

The key assessment descriptors within each progress point were constructed by teachers and informed by the National Curriculum, B Squared and Performance Scales to ensure that the very small steps of learning can be tracked.