In our recent webinar we discussed the impact of school closures on primary attainment and planning for the spring term. We explored the findings of our study into autumn 2020 attainment, as well as speaking to two primary schools: Ladybrook Primary School and St Barnabas C of E Primary School. Below are a few of the highlights.
Ladybrook Primary School
Ladybrook Primary School adopted our termly standardised reading and maths assessments, PiRA and PUMA, in response to the 2020 summer term school closures. By nature, Ladybrook is not a formal test focused school. This is because teacher assessment skills are strong. However, they wanted to understand the academic impact of lockdown as quickly as possible. After speaking to a number of local schools in the area, they adopted the assessments to quickly baseline their pupils. After identifying knowledge gaps using the PiRA and PUMA assessments, Ladybrook adopted Shine: targeted interventions for the areas of weakness demonstrated in PiRA and PUMA. Off the back of this, teachers held targeted intervention classes twice weekly for ten weeks. All children, including those who had taken part in the interventions, were re-tested before Christmas and most children had made at least expected progress. Ladybrook plan to repeat this process over the next few weeks in the spring term.
You can listen to Ladybrook's full testimonial below. It contains lots of useful information, so it's well worth a listen!
St Barnabas C of E Primary School
St Barnabas C of E Primary School have been administering PiRA and PUMA assessments for a number of years and, much like Ladybrook Primary School, have used the tests for baselining purposes. St Barnabas makes full use of the diagnostics in MARK (our free online reporting tool), as well as the targeted interventions available in Shine. This has enabled them to quickly see a full breakdown of strengths and weaknesses in individual pupils and groups, as well as giving them access to the interventions materials. St Barnabas use Arbor MIS, and the links between MARK and Arbor mean that the central team in their MAT can easily see all of the schools within the trust.
You can listen to St Barnabas' headteacher below - it's a great listen, bursting with information about their plans for the spring term!
More information about PiRA and PUMA can be found here, and details about Shine can be found here. If you want to learn more about links between MARK and our partners, information can be found here.
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assessment