Assessment

How and why we assess children's learning at Clifton

Within Lessons

Teachers use questioning and feedback from talk partner work to assess the children's understanding of previous and new learning. Further questioning is used to address any misconceptions or to deepen this understanding.

When the children are working independently, teachers move around the classroom to assess their learning and again, intervene with questioning to: address misconceptions; move the learning forward or deepen understanding.

The emphasis is on the children, themselves, being able to identify their own ways forward against clear success criteria.

Through Marking

Our Marking Policy aims to maximise the impact on teaching and learning and children's progress whilst, at the same time, making it a manageable process for teachers. They read through the children's work in books and make notes of misconceptions and ways forward or improvements needed in a marking diary.

In the next lesson, they teach and model the improvements needed, highlighting clear success criteria. Talk partners then work together to identify and make improvements in their work or to complete an intervention before moving onto new learning.

For Maths, there is also an emphasis on the children identifying their own errors and making improvements within the lesson before moving onto more challenging tasks.

Our aim is for children to take more responsibility and ownership for the quality of their work and to be able to identify and work through their own misconceptions wherever possible.

Day to Day and the use of internal and statutory data

Over a half term, children's learning is assessed regularly against the National Curriculum objectives on School Pupil Tracker On Line. The categories are: taught, working towards, mostly achieved, achieved and greater depth. This then enables teachers to review gaps in learning and the next steps throughout half term for the whole class, different pupils and individual children.

This is also done in pupil progress meetings with a member of SLT at the beginning of every term and half term. It also provides an assessment code every half term to demonstrate how on track each child is to achieving the expected standard at the end of the year.

SLT also use class data during learning walks and book scrutinies to evaluate the performance of different pupil groups , looking at strengths and ways forward. Year group and statutory data also supports SLT in tracking each cohort’s progress towards achieving end of year and end of Key Stage targets as well as the school improvement plan.

Pupil Progress Meetings

These involve:

• Evaluating the impact of recent learning interventions.
• Monitoring the performance between different pupil groups, particularly for our identified vulnerable groups.
• Reviewing the children's progress towards achieving their end of year targets.
• Identifying gaps and next steps in learning.
• Identifying children for and establishing learning interventions needed to improve their progress.

Early Learning Years

Baseline assessments are made as children enter Nursery and Reception in order to track children’s progress through EYFS carefully. Observations of the children during their learning inform teacher judgements about how they are progressing against the ‘Development Matters’ bands for which Learning Journals provide clear evidence.

Attainment and progress is monitored carefully for the different learning areas on school pupil tracker on line in order to address gaps between different pupil groups and progress concerns for individual children.

Reading and Maths Tests

These are completed every half term for Years 2 to 6. We use test results to: support ongoing teacher assessments throughout the year; monitor children's progress towards their FFT Aspire predicted scaled scores and to provide feedback to teachers about areas for improvement through question level analysis.