November 2017

Eye of newt and witches brew, Question Bank has an early halloween treat for you...

Join us on the third part of our journey with St Barnabas Church of England First and Middle School as we explore their use of our termly standardised assessment suites PiRA, PUMA, GAPS and NTS Assessments. St Barnabas also makes full use of MARK, our free online assessment and reporting tool trusted by over 6,000 schools.

The Reading Planet Tour is over but what a fantastic few weeks it was! We met Take a look at some pictures from the events which took place across the UK. 

Add your PiRA, PUMA and GAPS pupil test data into Aspire Pupil Tracking.  Standardised scores are then converted automatically, in real-time, to a DfE scaled score. This is the ‘common currency’ used by Aspire Pupil Tracking to compare PiRA, PUMA and GAPS results to other tests, TAs, targets and FFT’s own benchmark estimates.

Join us on the second part of our journey with St Barnabas Church of England First and Middle School as we explore their use of our termly standardised assessment suites PiRA, PUMA, GAPS and NTS Assessments. St Barnabas also makes full use of MARK, our free online assessment and reporting tool trusted by over 6,000 schools.

We recently spent some time at Churchfields Junior School to see in action how the teachers and students have been using their Franklin Watts and Wayland books. They’ve come up with an innovative way to integrate them into their classroom teaching, using them in their foundation subject lessons for Years 5 and 6.

In August, the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) released new guidelines for access arrangements which came into effect on the 1^st September.

Today is World Mental Health Day and to celebrate the importance of getting children talking about wellbeing and mental health we are giving you the chance to win a bundle of goodies for your school! 

What should we expect of a primary subject leader?  With the new Ofsted framework now coming into effect, a new article by James Bowen on the TES website calls for Ofsted to be realistic about expectations placed on subject leaders in light of such a big change.

"We use On Track Maths as our whole school ‘catch up’ program for children who need intervention support. This is massively important in a school with a mastery approach where everyone moves on together. Without something as high quality and rigorous as On Track Maths in place, the whole mastery approach would be at risk of collapsing at any point." Read on to find out what else Walton-le-Dale Primary School have to say about our intervention resource, On Track Maths!