What are our Assessment Principles?

1. Assessment puts your child at the centre of their learning
2. Assessment provides feedback, which recognises effort and gives next steps to ensure all  learners are making progress
3. Assessment is used to inform high quality teaching and learning
4. Assessment is consistent, fair and reliable.

Formative Assessment (Day to Day and about improvement)

We assess your child informally each time we teach a lesson.  This information is used to plan the next lesson.  Your child may be involved in self assessment and peer assessment and this helps them check their own standards (met the lesson objectives) and those of other children.  Peer assessment is important and helps children to help others and to also spot ideas and concepts to use in their own work.

We ask questions, such as:

• How well are you doing?
• What progress has he made?
• What does she need to do now?

It is on-going and continuous.

Summative Assessment (Testing/Accountability)

We ask questions, such as:

• What standard have you got to?
• Is she at Level x?
• Can he do his 6 times table?

Your child's work is given an overall assessment at the end of each term.  This helps us to track standards across school and ensure children are making good or better progress across the year group expectations..  Children are identified as early as possible if they need to have an 'intervention' to make sure they stay 'on-track' to meet national expectations.

We currently have interim expectations at each key stage, but we are already aiming higher than those in our Reading, Writing and Mathematics teaching and learning.  

Children are formally tested in Year Six in Reading, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, and Mathematics. This is a designated week in May. Writing assessment is teacher assessed against a specific criteria.  It is an all or nothing checklist, i.e. if your child cannot write neat, legibly and joined at year 6 then they will not meet the expectation.

Year Two children sit tests provided by the Government (Reading, Writing, Mathematics) and they are used to make an informed Teacher Assessment judgement of their standards.  This happens across the month of May.

Year One are testing in their Phonics Development, usually in June.  Any children who do not meet the Phonics Standard will have to sit the test in the next year group to check they have met the minimum standard.

All national testing is reported to parents/carers.