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Education
Assessment
Our students’ progress through the curriculum and personal development is extremely important to us.
Rationale
At Ercall Wood Academy, we believe that assessment is essential to drive great teaching and learning. Assessment measures students’ ability to understand, retain, and recall the essential knowledge they need to reach their potential in learning, life and work. It provides meaningful feedback to students and teachers informing both the teaching and learning process. We set ambitious goals for all our students and use assessment information to help both our teachers and students to identify where they are on their learning journey and what their next steps are.
AIM
Using the principles and processes of assessment, our aim is to:
- Monitor progress and support learning.
- Identify gaps in knowledge, including misconceptions and provide next steps in learning.
- Inform students of their progress and provide on-going guidance on how to improve.
- Ensure core expectations of planning, teaching, additional support, curriculum development and the creation of learning resources, are at the forefront of day-to-day practice.
- Communicate with parents and the wider community about our students’ achievement.
- Provide timely information to ensure continuity and challenge when student’s move up to the next year group, key stage or pathways leading to post 16 study.
- Comply with statutory requirements.
Assessment Approach
- Assessment measures students’ ability to understand, retain, and recall the essential knowledge.
- The key stage 3 curriculum contains the building blocks of essential knowledge and skills needed to give students a broad understanding of the subject. Assessment is used to measure how much of each block students have mastered and what is needed to be retaught through intervention to ensure all students have the platform for success at key stage 4.
- Teachers use formative assessment in every lesson to check for understanding, identify gaps or misconceptions in the essential knowledge and respond appropriately to move learning forward.
- Written and verbal feedback from teacher assessment helps students to understand the steps they need to take to deepen their knowledge and improve their skills. It will help motivate students to apply the effort required to take those steps to make sustained improvements in their learning.
- Students’ assessment of their own and their peers’ progress and attainment is a central function in the learning process can lead to significant and sustained improvements in student metacognition and learning.
- Teachers are the subject experts and are empowered to adopt the type of feedback that has the greatest impact for their students studying their subject.
- Time is built into the curriculum for students to reflect on and respond to teacher marking and feedback to improve future performance.
- At the end of each assessment cycle, all students complete a summative assessment for each subject. This provides teachers, students and their families with an insight into how their child is progressing on their curriculum journey.
