How our students are assessed

Allerton High School: Assessment Approach

Our approach to assessment is designed to ensure all students receive specific and relevant feedback on work they have produced independently to enable them to improve. We regularly assess students in two ways – formatively, in class every lesson and summatively, as scheduled, throughout the year and provide feedback following this assessment in a number of different ways.

Formative Assessment

The most powerful form of assessment and feedback is that which takes place every lesson as teachers interact with students in the classroom. What students understand and can do is constantly being assessed each lesson through a variety of formative assessment strategies such as questioning and use of mini whiteboards. Feedback on successes, misconceptions and areas for improvement is given verbally by teachers, directly to students, every lesson. Extensive research, including that of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), suggests that this type of feedback has the highest impact on student progress and confidence, even more so than written feedback. This is the most frequent and invaluable assessment and feedback that our students receive.

Summative Assessment

Each year group completes formal assessments periodically throughout the year. These assessments are always completed in controlled conditions within school and are marked by the teacher. Students are given a score for each assessment and written PINS feedback. Not every individual assessment is graded but students will receive a grade for a combination of assessments (for example, two summative assessments that have taken place over the course of a term) on their Progress Review twice each year.

We must also ensure that students have enough time between summative assessments to learn new concepts and develop and practice skills so that there is a balance between the time spent learning and embedding skills and the time spent taking assessment.

Grading smaller assessments or pieces of work more frequently than this would be inaccurate and may result in fluctuation of grades as students do better on one topic or piece of work than another. Equally, the score a student receives for an individual assessment can make comparisons between subjects difficult as, at GCSE, all subjects have different grade boundaries and 40/80 in one subject may equate to a different grade than 40/80 in another subject.

In general, different subjects will create grade boundaries for the combination of assessments that feed into a student’s Progress Review grade. These will be different for each subject and will be based on usual GCSE grade boundaries, as well as the nature and difficulty of the assessments completed.

By combining multiple summative assessments like this, that have been spread out across the year, to give one grade, we are able to give students and parents/carers a more accurate idea of the grade a student is working at.

Progress Reviews

Each year group will have three Progress Reviews communicated to parents/carers over the course of the year; the first shares information on student’s Attitude to Learning and two further Progress Reviews share this information alongside an overall grade for the summative assessments that the student has completed over a set period of time.

Details of when summative assessments take place, what is assessed and how for each subject and which summative assessments form the basis of each Progress Review grade can be found for each year group using the links below.