So what changes will we make, post National Standards?

We intend to proceed by keeping all that we want to keep and making changes to how we share information with board, parents, whanau, community and other stakeholders in the following ways

For students: we will make our mid- and end-of-year reports more student-driven. The writing of the report is to be done in class time, with students and teachers working together to highlight each student’s own personal story of progress, learning and achievement. Students and teachers together will set targets, make goals, self-assess their key competencies, write their own personal story about learning. Each class will write a narrative that tells their unique story of learning across the curriculum thereby reflecting each class’ own story. This will be supported by conversations at student-led conferences and discussions about our progressions.

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For parents: We will set end of year expectations/goals with each child and parent and report against those, with a strong focus on ipsative assessment. Each report already contains a graphic showing the starting point at the beginning of the year, the target end of year, and the mid-year and end of year actual result. Now we will try to make this progress framed more around individuals and how much progress they can realistically achieve, as students who were often well below and below could not often make a year’s progress.  This then becomes a conversation with each student and whānau about how much progress is realistic for each student, hopefully a year, and sometimes more or less depending on the individual (for example, special needs, ESOL, gifted). More importantly, we will emphasise information on progress across the curriculum (not just reading, writing and maths) and include references to our new Graduate Profile, and 21^st century skills, (our key competencies) so that parents, learners and ourselves keep the whole student clearly in mind.

The Prospect School report from the National Standards era, which already showed progress and achievement, is easily adaptable for the 2018 changes that the school wishes to make.  Prospect School example report (PDF 1 MB)

For Board and community: We have been reporting against National Standards (archived) targets for eight years now. The board likes the clarity that it brings to our achievement information, so what we will do is change the wording from "percentage at and above National Standards" to "percentage of students reaching expectations". We see no need for further change at this stage. Our thinking is that this will work nicely as we expand our formal reporting to encompass more of the curriculum, probably against the five dimensions of our graduate profile, using rubrics such as the one for whanaungatanga below.

Assessment and reporting overview 2018

You can download Prospect School's current assessment schedule below.

Student Assessment and Reporting Overview 2018 (PDF 69 KB)