Hello everyone, I'm a day late with this one. Apologies - I spent yesterday reading through every UK Government Education Act since 1989. Seriously. I'm writing a paper on how assessment has changed through the ages - I'll share the abridged version here as soon as I'm allowed. It's interesting stuff but it takes a lot of time, hence being a little tardy with this week's blog post.
Also, last week's post didn't get much love, so if you here reading this one, you should totally check it out when you're done. It's here.
This week is going to be a very quick read but very useful if you have a child who has been kept home from school for the past month and a bit. The week of May 13th is Statutory Assessment time in UK Primary schools. The SATs would be finishing today and the nation would be breathing a sigh of relief.
In a few weeks, you as a parent would receive the grade (now reduced to a simple 'pass' or 'fail' dressed up as 'ready for Secondary' / 'not ready for Secondary' - although it's actually not as cruel as it sounds. More on that as soon as I'm allowed to share it!). But this year that is not going to happen. No children are going to be assessed.
There are benefits to this - arguably the amount of stress for your child has been reduced, although if the school are doing things properly, assessment should never be a stressful time for a child. However, a lot of parents I speak to would like to know how their child is doing. Y'know, officially.
Well, I figured I would offer my 10+years of experience and share with you my assessment packages for free.
These are based on the National Curriculum; they are year group specific; they have agreed mark schemes and grade outcomes. And I'm offering them for free.
To be absolutely crystal clear, the assessments themselves can probably be found online for free anyway, what I am offering is a neat package for Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Maths Reasoning plus marking. That's right, I'll mark your child's work and let you know how they did. All it will take is some time from them and an email from you.
And that's it. That's all I have this week - I have some teaching to do in a few minutes, then it's back to the research grindstone. Like I said, do check out last week's post because it's about eSafety and there's some good advice and free resources there.
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If for some reason the picture link doesn't work, you can also access the materials here.
Have a great week everybody!
Carl Headley-Morris