Join us on the fourth and final 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.
Over the past 3 weeks, in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the St Barnabas series, we’ve learned all about Stephen Booth’s (St Barnabas’ Acting Head Teacher) experience with PiRA, PUMA and GAPS. We’ve also heard what the pupils themselves have to say about sitting the papers. In addition, Natalie (Year 2 Class Teacher) and Louise (Year 6 Class Teacher) have told us their thoughts about our new, termly, National Test-style, standardised suite, NTS Assessments. This week we’ll be focussing on St Barnabas’ experience using MARK.
What are the advantages of using MARK?
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“MARK is pretty perfect.”
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“We like the idea that we can enter question level data into MARK and that will then produce a variety of reports that will assist us in tracking pupil attainment and pupil progress, but also as a planning tool for future lessons.”
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“MARK has saved us hours and hours of number crunching. MARK does all of that automatically.”
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“MARK is incredibly easy to set up and even easier to use.”
How do you use the reports?
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“We use the reports to report back to children, to report back to teachers, to discuss at teacher level, and also to report back to our Multi Academy Trust.”
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“At a class teacher level, it allows our teachers to pull off reports which show how well children have done in particular aspects of the test. So rather than just having a general mark for reading, it allows us to see which sub-levels and strands within those tests the children have performed well at."
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“At a school level, my senior leadership team hold half-termly progress meetings. They use the reports to report back how well their individual class is doing.”
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“It allows the information to be presented back to us in a really clear and informative way. Some of the reports come back in a tabular format with columns and rows. There are more intuitive reports that allow you to look at a child’s percentile rank and really nice pie charts that show you how many or what percentage of children are working above age-related expectations, at age-related expectations or below age-related expectations.”
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“The beauty of it is that depending upon the arena and the stakeholders that you are talking to, there is a report within MARK that fits the bill.”
Watch this video to hear what else Stephen has to say about MARK!
Thank you!
Thank you for joining us on this journey with S Barnabas Church of England First and Middle School, we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Don’t forget that you can relive the series at any time.
If you have any questions about the assessments explored, fill in your details and one of our friendly Assessment Consultants will be in contact soon!
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Assessment