Assessment and Progression and Review

Assessment and Feedback

Our Assessment, Feedback and Reporting Policy has been reviewed so that are under-pinned by the  overarching principles of progression, as outlined in the Welsh Government Progression Code. A link to our full policy will be available in due course.

Curriculum Driven Assessment: Our CFW documents demonstrate planned progression in learning, which include identified learning outcomes that will measure and report on stduent outcomes.

Aims

To promote a whole school approach to assessment; to ensure that both formative and summative methods of assessment are used in order to provide feedback to learners, promote learning and provide a basis for the delivery of effective teaching techniques. To ensure that appropriate use is made of data to set appropriately challenging but achievable targets for learners.

To ensure that all statutory reporting processes are complied with (Appendix 1)

Rationale

Assessment should play an integral part of the Hawarden High School Learning Cycle, helping learners to understand what they know or do not know and highlight in terms of skills what they can or cannot do.  It is the means by which we know whether teaching has resulted in learning. Assessment should be evident in every lesson; effective assessment is key to high-quality teaching and learning generating better information, for better decisions, for better learning.  Assessment is essential to inform teacher’s planning and interventions through:

 

Understanding the progress students are making in terms of their acquisition of both knowledge and skills in lessons.

 

Purpose and Aims

·         To track progress, attainment and achievement of all pupils each lesson and across sequences of lessons and over the academic year.

·         To be used to identify skill and knowledge deficits of individuals and whole teaching groups so impactful interventions can be made by the teacher.

·         To check pupils understanding systematically and provide clear, direct feedback.

·         To help plan learning opportunities that help students remember in the long term the content that has been taught

·         To provide support for involvement of parents and carers in their child’s progress

·         To provide a clear view of current progress for SLT, Governing Body, Curriculum leaders, Subject leaders and external agencies as required.

·         To provide a system that can work alongside national data sets in order that internal data is valid and measurable.

Forms of Assessment

Assessment for Learning (Formative Assessment)

 

Assessment for learning is the ongoing day-to-day assessment that generates a range of qualitative information about learner progress, which is often not recorded.  Assessment for learning takes place to gather information about a learner or group of learners, what they understand or do not understand and how future teaching will be adapted to account for this. This is planned for and will take place in nearly all lessons as part of the Hawarden High School Learning Cycle. Various methods of feedback will be given to students across the curriculum as a result of effective formative assessment

 

Each curriculum area should aim to implement the following AfL principles

 

·                    Learning objectives should be set at the start of each lesson to ensure that all pupils know their personal objectives within the lesson. Wherever possible pupils should be part of the process of setting the learning objectives.

 

·                    Assessment criteria should be shared with pupils before they complete tasks to allow them to identify what they need to do to improve in that task.

 

·                    Oral feedback, peer marking and self-marking should be used for assessment during a lesson.

 

·                    Pupils should be given sufficient time to formulate their answer(s) to questions asked in class before verbalising.

 

·                    The whole school feedback policy (Appendix 2) and department policy is to be followed when giving feedback to pupils.

 

·                    SiMS and Epraise should be used when registering pupils to praise achievement or raise concerns

 

Assessment of Learning / Attainment (Summative Assessment)

 

Assessment of learning measures attainment within a learning or subject area. It is used to draw some conclusions at the end of a significant period of time, or at the end of a unit of work and is usually recorded formally.  Upon marking summative assessments teachers will typically offer whole class feedback and students will be asked to identify from this feedback their own areas of strength and areas for development.

 

Cumulative Summative Assessment Points will be set throughout the year according to the following cycle:

 

Years 7, 8 and 9 – 1 per term

Years 10 – 3 per year – including 1 end of year trial exam

Year 11 – 3 per year – including 2 trial exams

Year 12 – 3 per year – including 2 trial exams

Year 13 – 3 per year – including 2 trial exams

 

Teachers will mark and provide whole class feedback for each exam. Students will be expected to make changes and correct mistakes using purple pens and identify areas of strengths and areas for development based on their performance in the tests.


Principles of progression- Overarching principles: Five principles of progression underpin progression across all Areas. The principles are as follows. 

 Increasing effectiveness - As learners progress, they become increasingly effective at learning in a social and work-related context. As they become increasingly effective they are able to seek appropriate support and independently identify sources of that support. They ask more sophisticated questions and find and evaluate answers from a range of sources. This includes increasingly successful approaches to self-evaluation, identification of their next steps in learning and more effective means of self-regulation. 

Increasing breadth and depth of knowledge - Learners need to acquire both breadth and depth of knowledge. As learners progress, they develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of concepts that underpin different statements of what matters. They see the relationships between these and use them to further shape, make sense of and apply knowledge. This consolidates their understanding of concepts.

Deepening understanding of the ideas and disciplines within the Areas - Holistic approaches are particularly important in early learning as learners engage with the world around them. Learners should become increasingly aware of ways in which ideas and approaches can be coherently grouped and organised. As they progress they need to experience and understand disciplinary learning in each of the Areas and see these in the context of the four purposes and the statements of what matters. 3.1.5 Refinement and growing sophistication in the use and application of skills - Learners need to develop a range of skills including: physical, communication, cognitive and Area specific skills. In the early stages of learning, this range of skills includes focus on developing gross and fine motor; communicative and social skills. They also develop the skills of evaluating and organising information in applying what they have learned. As learners progress, they demonstrate more refined application of existing skills, and will experience opportunities to develop new, more specific and more sophisticated skills. Over time, learners become able to effectively organise a growing number of increasingly sophisticated ideas, to apply understanding in various contexts and to communicate their thoughts effectively, using a range of methods, resources or equipment appropriate to their purpose and audience. 

Making connections and transferring learning into new contexts - Learners should make connections with increasing independence; across learning within an Area, between Areas, and with their experiences outside of school. Over time these connections will be increasingly sophisticated, explained and justified by learners. They should be able to apply and use previously acquired knowledge and skills in different, unfamiliar and challenging contexts.