The daylight hours drawing in, the chill in the air and the evening twinkle of the first festive lights can only mean one thing: the Autumn school term is drawing to a close. This means most schools are getting ready to send their first major assessment reports of the year home to parents.
Whether you're new to assessment reporting or looking for a deeper understanding of enhancing your practice, we are here to help. In this blog, we'll share valuable insights into how you can use the SchoolBase MIS to build reports with ease and accuracy.
Are you ready to elevate your assessment game? Keep reading!
Why is it Important to Manage School Assessment Reporting Efficiently?
Providing parents with detailed insights is essential for improving the student experience. Assessment reports are a brilliant tool for both parents and teachers to have a view of when planning how to support each pupil. Having this shared understanding can boost outcomes, which ultimately reflects better on the school or college.
Some other reasons why assessment reports should be managed professionally are as follows:
- Administration tasks are reduced when software supports the creation of reports. This means more time can be spent directly helping students.
- School reports must also contain the latest information for interventions and additional support to be best matched for pupils. Using software to achieve this means real-time updates can be included.
- Having a defined process for writing assessment reports also improves consistency and compliance with different industry standards.
- It is also vital to get the quality of reports right. If parents and other stakeholders feel better informed about all aspects of educational performance, everyone can better understand a child's progress.
- Finally, efficient assessment reporting allows for a more personalized approach to learning. By accurately tracking each student's progress, strengths, and challenges, educators can tailor instruction to meet individual needs, ensuring that all students receive the support and opportunities they need to succeed.
How Does our School MIS Improve Assessment Reporting?
Assessment Reporting is the most popular part of the SchoolBase system (after legally required Registration!) and offers you many advantages over traditional paper reports home, including:
- Flexible set-up with a selection of grades, scores, comments, curriculum statements and even images within reports.
- Everyone can work on the reports at the same time, at times that suit them (no passing crates of reports around!).
- SchoolBase knows who teaches what subject to which children, so setting up is easy. The system also includes built-in attendance statistics and averages.
- Seamless delivery to parents through the parent portal, by email, or via the API to 3rd party portals and communication systems you choose.
- Built-in spell checking, gender checking and name-checking on comments.
- Mark your assessments as 'done' to easily see how far you've got through the work and avoid accidentally overwriting completed work.
- Easy access to all your past reports, past comments and grades for comparison. You can also easily import data from tracks or past assessments.
- Real-time tracking of grades and scores from all staff to see progress through time.
- Stress-free cloning of last year's reports if the structure is the same or if there are only minor changes.
Within SchoolBase, standard templates are available straight away, or we can build custom templates to your specification. To create a new template, or many edits to an existing one, we ask for 4-weeks’ notice. For most of the year this is plenty of time, and you're likely to get your new reports a week or two before they were due. At the two peak times of the year, in the run-up to Christmas and the run-up to the end of the Summer term, we have a big spike in demand, and everyone has roughly the same deadline, publishing for the end of term.
When our reports team deliver a new template to you, it comes with notes to help you through the set-up. If you have any small questions or issues, you are always welcome to contact our support team. If you haven't been using assessments in SchoolBase, and want to start, take a look at our webinars here Assessments Videos