Image: George Orwell’s report card from Eton. He did ok.
This recent inquiry into school reporting by Catholic Schools NSW revealed a lot of what we have long known as teachers. Reports can be vague, full of jargon, cautious and ultimately too late to action. This post is both a right of reply on behalf of teachers and teacher leaders, and because I don’t like to simply moan about problems in our industry, I’ll offer some ideas to improve the way we report, for whatever they’re worth. Here are some of the complaints and possible reasons for these issues:
Reports are vague
Paradoxically, this feeds into the other charges, that reports are overly cautious and full of jargon. Vagueness is one way of avoiding jargon. The other issue is that in 150 words, teachers are faced with choices of being pragmatic and precise about the nuanced changes and practices that a student needs to engage in, but also capture the macro habitual actions needed for improvement. The same student may actually need to make a purposeful attempt to use abstract vocabulary (jargon) but would also make huge gains if they actually did some independent practice (vague).
Reports are cautious
Again, within 150 words, magic bullets can’t be offered. Student success comes from a variety of factors including teacher quality, hard work and student ability. Telling a struggling student and their parents that the three actions suggested in a report will lead to improvement may be misleading. With increased parental participation in schooling, especially in the private system, teachers are hesitant to offer hard solutions. It shouldn’t be this way, but fear often rules in reporting. In a similar way, student inertia and disengagement often needs to be written about euphemistically, depending on the school/parent dynamic, which helps nobody.
Reports are not timely
I remember scoffing aloud when I read the part of the article where parents said they would like a report in Term One, not with contempt of course, but disbelief. There are two problems with this, one is obvious to any teacher or leader reading this post. Assessment and reporting is a cumbersome beast that takes a whole lot longer than it should. We know this. It takes a term to teach students anything, then another whole term to report. The final report is purely summative and the teacher for the new year needs to begin all over again with very little handover likely in a large school. The second problem, which now seems obvious on reading this article, is that clearly parents don’t know this. This reveals a lack of transparency in reporting practices, and a lack of knowledge on the part of parents about how assessment and reporting works in their schools. This is a real opportunity for school leadership and some schools took COVID as a chance to review this really meaningfully.
So what now?
I’m not going to offer a coherent vision here but I do have some ideas that complement the work we already do in this area. I’m all about sustainable leadership so I’m always looking for ways to do better, rather than just do more.
Use existing markbook software to offer continuous reporting. I estimate that after a task, it would take a class teacher approximately 15 minutes to batch scan and upload the feedback sheets - that they have already written anyway - to the student’s record. With most packages, this will be attached to the mark announcement. Follow up with a whole parent group email to say that marks and feedback have been released. Readability by parents could also be a pretty good proxy for whether students understand what they need to do next.
As a leader, demand clarity and pragmatics when editing reports. Explain to your teams why the edits are being requested and what the goal of reporting is. Is it possible that your staff want to impress parents with jargon because they want to impress? Likewise, are vague comments less likely to discourage parent conversations? In the vein of Viviane Robinson, it can help to try to discover why your teams approach their report styles in these ways if you really want to change their practices.
A ‘no surprises’ policy will alleviate some teacher fears. The report is not the time for parents to be hearing about a significant drop in marks or a low grade. Have those difficult conversations early.
If your school manipulates data, explain to parents why and some basics about how. This can take the form of a screencast. Ask your data expert to explain why in the simplest possible terms and back your decision as a school. Not all schools will adjust data but there are usually sound reasons for doing it. Education for parents about how to read report data can also be helpful.
Communicate in a timely way about effort. Make sure you inform your pastoral teams. Again, no surprises.
Finally, encourage parents through your newsletter and other outfacing communications to be involved in their child’s education: they should be able to report on their child’s learning too. It’s a wonderful affirmation of the power of the home when you complete a parent meeting where the parent already knows what their child struggles with.
I hope that this starts a discussion about what we can and can’t do. As an industry, we can do better, but do we really need to do more? I don’t think so, and I’m curious to hear what you think on Twitter or in the comments below.