Progress & Assessments
Parkfield School regularly tracks and monitors every student’s achievements to recognise students who are making good progress or to implement relevant intervention, when necessary, should concerns come to light. Once a term, this information will be sent home to parents.
Our assessment system for key stage 3 is designed to identify whether your child is making good progress in years 7, 8 and 9 and is therefore on track to meet their GCSE targets at the end of year 11. These give a challenging and realistic indication of the GCSE outcomes that students should be aiming to achieve.
These targets are subject-specific and are determined using students’ prior attainment, nationally benchmarked targets (FFT) and teachers’ professional judgement. Each grade has a set of assessment descriptors, which reflect the skills, knowledge and understanding a student will demonstrate if they are working in that particular grade band. These bands will be used by your child’s teacher when assessing work completed in class and for home learning, to identify the skills and knowledge your child has mastered and what they need to do to continue to make progress. In this way, we are always looking at the progress students are making towards a challenging, realistic GCSE target. On students’ work, you will see feedback which refers to next-steps targets. It will directly reference the assessment descriptors by showing students what they can now do and what they need to focus on next to improve and make even better progress.
Talking to your child about their progress. When a progress check is sent home, you may find some of the following questions useful when discussing it with your child:
Which subject are you particularly pleased with?
What is going well in this subject?
Is there anything you do in these lessons that you could start to do in lessons that you don’t find so easy?
What are you going to work on next, to continue making good progress?
How can you stretch yourself to make the most progress possible?
What is holding you back from making more progress in this subject?
Are there any surprises here?
If so, what do you think might help to explain them?
Attitudes to learning:
Detailed descriptors for your child's attitude to learning scores found on their Progress Check can be found by clicking the following link:
