Reports and Targets
What's included on my daughter's reports and when/where/how do I get them?
A full report is published once a year for every student. It contains:
- Attendance and punctuality information
- Target grades
- Current attainment
- Attention to Learning scores
- Teacher comments
A further ‘data dashboard’ report (data only) is published in July, alongside a tutor comment to recognise and celebrate all the other achievements outside of the classroom over the school year. In combination with parents evening, there are three scheduled opportunities for feedback to parents/carers on progress made in school over the year, with all year groups having had some form of feedback by Christmas, or very soon after. There are, of course, more frequent updates on achievement and behaviour available via the SIMS Parent app and parents/carers are also encouraged to contact the school should any concerns or queries arise.
Reports really provide just a brief snapshot. Your daughter will have much more continuous, formative, and useful assessment day-to-day in school to support her to progress. Written reports provide a level of feedback too – as do parents evenings - but data dashboards are just a quick visual overview for parents at the end of the year to see that all is in hand.
We set targets for the girls to give them an idea of what we believe they are capable of. We aim to set challenging but achievable targets for each of our students. There is more about how we approach setting targets here.
You can find out the timings of reports and parents evenings, alongside other key dates for each year group here.
We aim to be as paperless a school as possible. Reports are published via the SIMS Parent and Student apps and emails are sent when these become available.
Our approach at the Folkestone School for Girls
Firstly, we do not publish termly reports, nor do we have end of term tests in every subject at the end of every term! Ofsted deem that to be excessive. It places undue stress on the girls and takes valuable teaching time away delivering the actual curriculum. Much better to focus on the real purpose of assessment, which is to find out what is going well and where areas for improvement might lie. This is done through working with students directly, looking at the work produced, contributions made in lessons and in homework. By doing this, progress is checked in a more frequent way – as well, of course, in the odd formal test!
In reports, we look at current attainment. Current Attainment is an assessment by the teacher of what grade the student is currently working at. It is based not only on results obtained in recent class tests, but also on wider performance in class and in homework assignments. Therefore, it provides a broader, more rounded, overall assessment – rather than just a snapshot of one test, one day! For that reason, the latest class-based test result shared with students may differ slightly from the grade reported home.
The best assessment is assessment for learning. It doesn’t just provide a snapshot, a grade, a % score, an ‘above average’ or a traffic light colour – instead it finds where you went wrong, tripped up or lost out, and it tells you what you need to work on to improve, providing examples and feedback to help you. That happens in classrooms, in homework or class assignments. It might be written feedback or verbal. It might be tailor made to you or whole class feedback - a generalisation that your teacher makes from working with all of you and what they have observed in class or in homework's more generally. The report is just a part of this process, and we encourage our students to discuss their progress with their teachers as they go along.
Progress in Years 7 and 8
Parents and students often want a framework when considering progress, and so we would expect girls to be making steady advancement towards their final GCSE grades over their time with us. That progress is judged via traffic light colour coding on our reports.
The traffic light colour coding shows whether the student is ‘on or above’, ‘just below/broadly in line’ or ‘below expectation’ in terms of where we think they should be on their journey.
In years 7 and 8, students are still some way off GCSE and indeed have yet to even to decide which subjects to study to GCSE! We don’t publish that they are, for example, “currently working at a grade 2”, or a numerical score in a test. There are new subjects and new ways of working that they have to negotiate, and that would be unfair while they are finding their feet. We believe it is not right or proper to discuss scores or GCSE grades so early in secondary school.
We could publish % scores achieved in class tests and state the class average and/or year group average alongside that. This approach might be great for those students deemed ‘above average’, but for the 50%, by definition, deemed ‘below average’ much less so! That would do little to help their self-confidence – and actually neither group benefit in terms of finding out what they need to do to improve further. Moreover, at FSG, a selective school, all the girls are already above national average and within the top 25% by ability. Therefore, the class average comparison does not give an accurate measure against their peers in other schools, counties or across the wider country. Our aim is to make our students well qualified and well rounded - to inspire and spur them on. Raw statistics, at this age, will not do that as well as a teacher's considered, professional, judgement.
This is also why we do not specify individual ‘target’ grades for students in years 7 and 8 and instead suggest a notional GCSE grade to work towards. This is based on how students of similar ability nationally achieved in the past. Reports have a simple statement that will be along the lines of ‘in the past students of a similar ability went on to achieve mainly Grades 6 or 7 in their GCSE examinations’.
Progress in Years 9 to 11
In years 9, 10 and 11 students have now determined the subjects they will study to GCSE and are set individual target grades for each individual subject that they study. At this point we do begin to publish current attainment grades as students will begin to sit past GCSE papers (or at least past GCSE questions).
Clearly, a student in early Year 10 will not yet be working at the same level as a student at the end of Year 11 – but we would certainly expect to see good progress towards that GCSE End of Year 11 target.
In years 9, 10 and 11, we also publish a ‘current attainment’ grade, with traffic lighting indicating progress towards the target, in the same way as in Years 7 and 8.
Essentially our targets are based on a ‘flight path’ idea. Students start in Year 7 and will make progress throughout their school career as they journey towards GCSE. As students all have different starting points, they all therefore have different end points - thus they all have different targets! Whilst the national media obsesses about Grade 9s, for some students a grade 6 in History or a Grade 4 in Maths may have been equally hard fought and hard won as a grade 8 or 9 for another student – and so we recognise and celebrate all achievements; all progress made equally.
We also must acknowledge that progress is rarely such a straight line; the reality is that we all have little peaks and troughs along the way – a ‘spikier profile’ based on particular topics covered, attendance, events at home; there are lots of things that impact on us as individuals along the way! It’s for that reason that the odd amber, perhaps even the odd red shouldn’t necessarily induce panic; it may be just something to watch!
You can read more about how FSG sets targets here.
Progress in Years 12 and 13
This is much the same methodology but the starting point used to predict likely success at A Level are the results achieved at GCSE.
What is Attention To Learning (ATL)?
An Attention to Learning score is given by teachers in each subject. There is a traffic light coding on the ATL score, which is explained here:
How is my child getting on with homework?
We do not set excessive amounts of homework at FSG. Each teacher will provide a judgement on how well students are completing homework to give parents/carers an overview of their attitude in this area.
What attendance information is published?
We will include statistics on attendance and punctuality in your daughter's school report. There is more context given on our attendance page.