Assessment

Assessment system

At Stanford Junior and Infant School summative assessments are recorded termly following rigorous pupil progress meetings which teachers attend with the Senior Leadership Team. 
We use OTrack to record attainment and progress towards ambitious targets for each pupil and cohort. We have a three-stage recording system, to indicate which pupils are “beginning”, “developing” and “secure” in relation to end of year expectations. In addition to these stages pupils may be recorded as reaching “mastery”. 
Our interpretation of “mastery”: -

• all required Key Performance Indicators for end of Year expectations achieved
• learners can describe concepts and learning in their own words, with their own examples, explain confidently to others, make connections and  apply their learning in variety of contexts
• and, possibly, if depth of Mastery is evident, some Key Performance Indicators of the following year starting to be attained but not yet enough to be “beginning”

We also assess pupils in all the non-core subjects:

SMSC	RE	Science
PE	Music	French
Computing	DT	Music
Geography	History	PSHE

Feedback

Assessment drives learning. Feedback to pupils about their learning leads to new learning. Assessment is an essential part of the ethos in every classroom and a continual two way process between adults and children. Planning and assessment are thus interdependent processes.

At Stanford we are committed to teaching children in focus groups when possible to ensure that 'learning conversations' take place. Such conversations focus on the planned learning for the lesson and enable teachers to assess learning, give instant and constructive feedback and to scaffold / develop the next step with the child - immediate improvements can be made. Pupil self-evaluation becomes an essential component of this dialogue and is complete in lessons on a daily basis.

Self-evaluation:

• Actively involves pupils in their learning.
• Provides a window into pupils’ thinking
• Makes planned learning / assessment criteria visible
• Makes pupils’ learning visible to enable communication about it
• Enables feedback to support current learning and feed into the next stage of the teaching and learning process
• Enables feedback which helps pupils know how to improve 

Self-Assessment...

is known to make a valuable contribution to children’s learning, and children throughout the school are now used to being involved in self-assessment, using the planned learning objective as a criteria to assess their learning. We believe that the more aware children are of the purpose of what they do, and the steps they need to take to achieve a target, the more responsibility they will begin to take for their own learning - a vital aspect of achieving success.  At Stanford we use a range of assessments from self-assessment, peer assessment and also verbal feedback within lessons. Pupils assess against the learning objective and success criteria.

Age Related Expectations (ARE)

Since the removal of ‘Levels’ associated with the old National Curriculum the school has chosen instead to use an annual scheme to show if children are working at age related expectation (ARE); using a year group based approached which classifies children as working within a particular year group and as either Emerging, Developing, or Secure, (E, D, S) within that year.
This system is very transparent when examining a child's current attainment and is easy to recognise where a child’s learning sits in the 2014 National Curriculum. We also record the depth, creativity and complexity to which a child can apply their understanding into other contexts

Greater Depth

In addition to the term end of year expectations, the term greater depth is now used to measure a pupil’s level of understanding. Achievement is now focussed on the depth of understanding of the areas taught. Alongside this, the ability to apply this understanding in a variety of contexts rather than moving on to something new.

Therefore more able pupils are no longer encouraged to move up to the learning being taught in the year above, but to now spend time ensuring that they have fully grasped the learning in their own year group and are able to explore this in variety of ways.

This means that pupils working at greater depth are expected to be able to…

• Apply their learning to different contexts, including other areas of the curriculum.
• Work independently.
• Apply their skills and knowledge consistently, confidently and fluently.
• Organise their ideas to make connections with other areas of learning.
• Use their ideas to help them work with new areas of learning.
• Clearly explain what they have been doing and why they know they are correct to others.
• Teach others what they have learned to enable them to learn too.

 

Therefore greater depth is not…

• Working on content from the next year group.
• Practising the same concept with bigger numbers.
• Reading a more challenging text.