Assessment at Pinewood

Formative assessment is an essential element of effective teaching and provides one of the main foci the school has for ensuring pupil attainment. Assessment carried out by the teacher provides information on a pupil’s strengths and weaknesses within specific tasks, activities and skills. The teacher and pupils then build on these strengths and address the weaknesses both inside and outside lessons. Summative assessment takes place after the teaching and learning, at the end of a unit of work, term or key stage and it takes place.

The September that your child starts in F2 they will undertake the statutory baseline assessment which is collated by the DFE to determine the progress your children make from the beginning of primary school up until the end of Year 6. We do not base our predictions for attainment at Pinewood on these baselines but we use our own assessment systems to determine whether children are ‘on track’ or not and we continually assess against milestones during your child's time with us. At the end of F2 (Reception) we report on whether your child has met the early learning goals and our KS1 assessment system feeds on from this. 

Each year in June the Year 1 children take a Phonics Screening test to determine whether they have reached a certain threshold in being able to blend and read phonetically spelt words, both real and nonsense words. This information again is collated by the DFE and feeds into performance tables. If a child does not meet the threshold, they are retested again in June the following year.

Towards the end of Year 2 (usually May time) the Year 2 children undertake non-statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) in Reading Comprehension, Maths and Writing which support teacher judgements of attainment and allows the next school you children will attend to view a ‘standardised score’ to feed into their Year 6 attainment predictions.

We have systems internally that assess your children’s termly progress throughout and endeavour to keep you informed of your child’s progress at various points over the year. That said, we have an open door policy and are happy to talk with parents/carers at any point during the school year about how well your children are doing at school.