Ana V - Yr 3 & 4 and Yr 7&8
Irene Wilson - Yr 4
Jenni Clarke - Yr 5 & 6 and Yr 7&8
Toni Nua and Kent Somerville - Extension Testing
This year we were once again greatly challenged in terms of getting the balance right between continuing support programmes and getting the end of year testing completed.
It was great to have Ana V back testing with us. And Mrs Clarke is to be thanked for her huge effort in this space to ensure that we get there.
Jenni and Irene as well as completing the testing, entered the data which includes scanning the tests and uploading them into HERO. This makes a huge workload for the testers to process all of this and it would be advantageous to streamline this even further. It was suggested last year that an Admin person dedicated to inputing the results in a timely and consistent manner would be great however we did not manage to achieve this but would definitely like to follow this up in 2025.
Once again there were many collaborative conversations between the testers along the way, that helped to ensure there was consistency and rigour in this process. As we had done previously, a checklist was used to keep track of who had been tested, with teachers entering an up to date Instructional Level to support this process.
One of the big changes this year has been that our Year 1, 2 and 3s are not having to complete this assessment as the BSLA assessment regime is being followed for these cohorts. As a Year 3 child reaches the end of Year 3 the expectation is that they will have completed the BSLA Phonics Plus Readers and be graduated to the Colour Wheel texts and therefore will be tested using the PM Benchmarks. This will mean Year 4 teachers have an indicative Instructional Level for them going in to Year 4.
Further to this it was agreed that other than the Extension group, we would leave the testing of our Year 8s until the other testing is completed.
As stated there is always a tension between testing and sustaining Reading Support Programmes and we were more stretched than before on this front. It would be ideal to be able to employ someone who is dedicated to this process for at least a month.
It has been great to be able to export this Reading Data at the beginning of the year so that teachers have it at their fingertips for their new classes. We need to ensure that teachers still interact with the formative information that can be gained from this testing. So ensuring those artefacts are uploaded in HERO is critical to the cumulative record of learning for each of our ākonga.
Toni Nua
December 2024