Assessment in our School
Why Assess?
“Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.”
-- Alfie Kohn
In our school we believe very deeply in making sure children experience all that they need to become the very best version of themselves. We therefor need to know them inside and out and that is the true purpose of assessment. Tests do not do that. Standardised scores and formal assessments help us to create the very faintest preliminary sketches before we embark on new learning but it is in the day to day talk, jottings, drawings, independent learning and personal versions of outcomes that we start to shade in all the detail.
With each new topic, cycle, week and term we look again to see what we have learned about each child. We aim to hand over each child to their next teacher as a fully filled in portrait of their year's experiences.
Where data is gathered, it will be used to support those children who are not where we feel they should or could be.