Assessment

Our integrated assessment and reporting policy is designed to create simplicity and clarity in how our teachers encourage student progress over time and to help our students take ownership of their achievement. The more immediate, personalised and regular the assessment, the more effective it can be in helping us to plan effective lessons, spot misconceptions and help students understand how to ‘get better’ at the subject. The idea of integrating all of this activity across all departments and standardising summative and formative assessment activity is crucial to the school’s development. This will also help both students and parents understand the report card that we send out to you, in order to keep you abreast of how well your son or daughter is doing at school.

There must, of course, be enough flexibility within this to facilitate departments to help students to flourish within the specific rigours and strictures of their subject areas. Departments will deliver summative assessments, a simple method of ascertaining how much each students had remembered over time, and then formative assessments, which will allow teachers to plan how to help students to fix the errors that they are making in each subject. On top of this, questioning and whiteboards will also be used in lessons so that teachers can see what the students are thinking and therefore any mistakes or errors that they make.

In terms of assessment, feedback and reporting, there are some key touchstones to everything we do at NGA:

There are only two questions that need to be answered effectively by students to show that assessment and feedback is working:

1. What are you doing well in this subject?
2. What do you need to do to improve your work in this subject?

Any assessment done at NGA is accurately assessed and is used to either:

• Plan better and more tailored lessons;
• Spot and plug errors/gaps/misconceptions;
• Create significant, planned opportunities for students to understand how to produce more successful work.

Teachers are to use their time and energy in lessons on the daily and minute-by-minute assessment and feedback that really contributes to student progress and helps them improve and get better. We sincerely believe that the best assessment is regular, personal and immediate. This can only happen in lessons and that is what we want to provide. 

Teacher energy must be wholly aimed at helping students to improve and ‘get better’- nothing else.

The progress model that we use to assess student progress at key stage 3 is below:

Key Stage 3 Progress Model