Assessment

Formative assessment at Countess Anne School:

For the Early Years:

Countess Anne staff use the Early Learning Goals for our pupils in Reception Class. We will continue with this approach providing parents with termly reports about how their children are progressing. There are no formal tests at this age, but parents will be told at the end of the year how well their child has achieved compared to the age appropriate standard.

For the National Curriculum:

Each of the teachers for years 1 to 6 have a list of assessment objectives of what should be covered in English, Maths and Science. When a teacher works with their class it is these objectives that the pupils are being assessed against.

Progress against an objective is achieved firstly by demonstrating the skills of remembering, understanding and application. Once these are achieved a pupil is given the opportunity to deepen their understanding by using the processes of analysis, creativity and evaluation. This movement from ‘remembering’ to ‘evaluation’ is called Bloom’s Taxonomy and is how teachers at Countess Anne decide on the next steps of learnings for a child.

Due to the high validity of formative assessment we feel that it is appropriate that we report a pupil’s formative progress to parents. We have defined progress in such a way as to express a child’s progress made against the year’s objectives and the depth with which the child can use and apply them. We have called these definitions Curriculum Assessment Progress Definitions and they can be found on the following page.