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Assessment and Progress

The school curriculum has been designed with continuity from Year 7 to Year 13 in mind. 

Common assessment and grading principles are used throughout all year groups. Assessment grading for Year 7 to 11 is based on the principles of GCSE, whilst Post 16 courses use applicable A Level/Pre-U/alternative Level 3 provision criteria.

Progress Ladders:

Progress ladders focus on the development of skills necessary to achieve in each subject and are based on the principles of Blooms Taxonomy, with students increasingly able to access and perform proficiently at higher level skills thresholds. Progress ladders are shared with students as well as being used to inform the development of task specific success criteria. Assessment feedback also refers to the principles of progress ladders to help students know exactly what they need to do to improve.

 

Assessment principles:

One of the significant new challenges of revised specification GCSEs is the requirement to learn, remember and recall large volumes of information studied over long time periods. All courses are now linear. As such, our assessment system is designed to promote the development of skills over the longer term and to foster study skills that will best prepare students for the rigour of GCSE exams. 

A variety of task types and assessment feedback are used to promote long-term learning. Much of this happens in class, but the value of independent learning outside of the classroom is promoted through the use of ‘Prep’ and ‘Assessed Homework (AH)’.

  • Prep tasks are tasks that consolidate the learning or introduce something new. Prep will typically take 15-25 minutes and will be needed and used at the start of the following lesson.
  • Assessed Homework tasks are assessments that review student understanding and allow feedback to be given to help students to progress. AH typically takes between 30-50 minutes, depending on Year Group and subject. Results from AH do not contribute to reported current grades, but they are important ‘stepping-stones’ to learning.

All work completed in lessons and through Prep and AH helps students to progress towards more long term, more substantial common assessment. These Common Assessment Tasks (CATs) are relatively infrequent, but at least once per nine week teaching Phase. The results are used to generate current grades, which are reported home. 

Prep  ---- Prep ---- AH ---- Prep ---- Prep ---- AH ---- Prep ---- CAT = Grade reported