Assessment

Assessing your child

Our assessment system

The staff at Barrington Primary are very clear that the assessment tools that we use need to show children's next steps and allow progress to be tracked across the school and not just at the end of a Key Stage.

The principles that underpin our assessment system are:
 
  • Every child can achieve: teachers at Barrington have the mindset, ‘What do I need to do next to enable a child in my class to achieve?’
  • The National Curriculum objectives will be used as the expectations for all children.
  • Children will make age appropriate progress – 12 months in 12 months.
  • Teachers are experts at assessment - assessment will be effectively used to ensure the correct scaffolding is built into lessons to ensure all children achieve.

In order to be ‘secondary ready’ children need to meet the required end of Key Stage 2 expectations; this is broken down into key outcomes for each curriculum year. We use the National Curriculum objectives to assess outcomes for children at the end of each curriculum year – for example:

  • A child that has achieved all the objectives set out for Year 3 for English would be said to be working at the end of Year 3 expectation for English and be 3s+ (secure+) on the Target Tracker system we use.
  • A child achieving half or so of the mathematics objectives for Year 5 would be classed as working within the mid-Year 5 expectation for maths and be 5w/ 5w+ (within) depending on how many of the objectives they have achieved.
  • A child achieving only a few reading objectives for Year 1 would be classed as working at the beginning of Year 1 expectations, and would be 1b/ 1b+ (beginning) depending on how many of the objectives they have achieved.

Our assessment and reporting system includes:

  • Ongoing questioning, observation and dialogue by the class teacher throughout each lesson.
  • Children knowing what they are being asked to learn and more importantly, why.
  • Sharing success criteria with the children during each lesson, work is then assessed against this criteria.
  • Feedback from each pupil, their peers or teachers have clearly identified next steps – this can be written or verbal feedback.
  • Regular scrutiny of pupils’ work.
  • Termly assessment weeks when the children work on more formal assessment tasks to help prepare them for the assessments they will sit in years.
A copy of our school assessment policy can be found on the policies page of our school website.