Assessment

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 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 Statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) in Reading Comprehension, Maths, Writing and an optional Spelling and Grammar test. These support teacher assessment judgements and are used to judge how well the school is performing against national targets and how well your child has progressed during their time at Pinewood. We know your children very well and predict accurately how your child will fair in these tests, but they are actually a statutory requirement so must be undertaken. They also give the Junior School a starting point to tailor learning and measure progress as your child continues through the educational system. The end of KS1 levels and this information is collated by the Local authority and the DFE and feeds into performance tables (as does the early years data). 

It is important that your child does not take holidays in term time as they may miss vital work that supports them for these test situations or may actually miss the test itself.