Tuesday, July 03, 2007
‘Do One!’I love writing, but school reports really are a chore. You try to avoid any controversy, trim, use terminological inexactitudes, resort to eduspeak and employ the services of ‘Copy and Paste’. Finally I’ve finished. Phew!
In the English and Maths sections we had to write whether the children were above, at or below ‘national standards’. At the staff meeting there was talk about the ‘grid from the consultants’. Anything from these androids I normally bin or file away at the bottom of a pile of papers, just in case I might need it for the purposes of self-preservation.
Digging it out from underneath all the other junk about planning, standards, unit plans, spare socks, paracetamol, pliers (here’s an interesting thought get teachers to empty their bags and would you find anything to inspire children? I’m as guilty as the rest), it prescribed a ‘Range of Abilities’ for report writing for all years – Below, Average, High.
At the end of Year 6 the average was 4B, not just 4C, but 4B, another case of the consultants ‘raising the bar’. At the end of Year 4 the expectation was 3B. Now I know that my 3Cs will all get Level 4 but under this crazy system I’d have to say they were ‘below national expectations’.
So there we have it, the consultants are now telling us what to put in our reports. Maybe we should e-mail them our test results and they can churn out reports on a computer and mail them out to parents.
I’m not changing my reports. The consultants? As they say in Liverpool, ‘Do One!’
