Assessment

We use assessment in our school to understand where children are in their learning so that we can know how to help them in where they need to go next. There are two main types of assessment:

Formative assessment: This happens minute-by-minute and day-to-day proactively by the teaching team where they use information about children’s learning to adapt their instruction to responsively support children’s needs. We draw on five assessment for learning strategies to support children to understand where they are in their learning, where they need to go next and how they can get there (Wiliam, 2011):

• Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
• Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
• Providing feedback that moves learners forward
• Activating children as learning resources for one another
• Activating children as owners of their own learning

Summative assessment: happens at the end of a term or unit of work, to identify how much learning a child has retained. Summative assessments happen three times a year at our school: in the Autumn, Spring and Summer terms. Teachers form their assessments based on different types of information about children’s attainment such as the use of a test, children’s recorded learning or teacher observations. These assessments then inform what parents receive in their child’s school reports in the Spring and Summer term.

Some summative assessments are also statutory, which means the materials are prepared by the Department for Education and sent to schools nationwide to complete. Below is a guide to which statutory assessments there are in each year group and when they take place. We report to parents on the outcomes of these at the end of each academic year in the child’s summer term report.

Information for parents about the national curriculum assessments for pupils in primary school (Standards and Testing Agency)