We felt that it was important to look at each of the pupils individually, as their experiences at home were so diverse that we could not be certain what they had learned over this period.
The data was incredibly powerful to demonstrate that a lack of reading at home had led to weaker outcomes and even diminished life chances.
Gathering baseline data is where the use of standardised assessments has come in, and GL Assessment’s suite of assessments have really helped to provide that starting point.
Where there may be a question about a child’s perceived limited progress, it is useful to have this objective standardised data.
There have been several new important considerations for assessing under the current Covid-19 restrictions to ensure the safety of pupils.
We need to become reacquainted with who has which skills and set up an early alert system to identify any changing learning trajectories.
This data from GL Assessment has been extremely useful in helping us to plan for the post-lockdown curriculum.
A holistic approach involving all those who know the pupil well, including the pupil voice, must be taken to gather assessment information at all stages
David Crossley, Associate Director of Whole Education, says CAT4 is well known for providing robust GCSE and A Level indicators but to solely use it for this purpose misses out on its potential.
We are really interested to see our Year 7 results, since they missed a term of learning in Year 6 and we have no SATs or nationally benchmarked data for these pupils.