Assessment and Reporting

Assessment and Reporting

At Melksham Oak School, ongoing assessment of student work is an integral part of the learning process and helps us to track where students are excelling and where they are falling behind so we can both support and challenge them. We send reports home electronically three times during the academic year for each year group (see below for our assessment schedule).

How we assess our students’ work

Summative assessments are generally longer assessments, including content from a range of sub topic areas linked to the curriculum and/or exam specification. These take place in all subjects in order to develop students’ learning and to gather progress data for the three assessment and reporting points. The work generated from these summative assessments is used for feedback, reflection and redrafting as part of our cycle of student feedback.

Qualification-linked exam papers, or parts thereof, are used in KS4 and KS5 with internal exams taking place in order to give students the experience of public examinations. KS3 assessments are linked to each subject’s curriculum, which is closely aligned to the National Curriculum.

The grades from these summative assessments are used by subject teachers to inform their judgements on current progress for reporting home, as well as for analysis and targeted support for students. We also expect our teachers to use ongoing shorter ‘formative’ style assessments to inform lesson planning and ensure students continue to progress.

Assessment and Reporting Schedule:

*SA = Summative assessment in the weeks prior to assessment points

Key Stage 3

During 2020, we designed and implemented a new assessment system for Key Stage 3.

Students are assessed against their specific aspirational target grade zone in each subject, and are judged to be making one of three possible degrees of progress:

This judgement is made in relation to the progress grids which we have created for each subject. These can be found by clicking the following links:

Key Stages 4 and 5

In Key Stages 4 and 5, we report home a minimum progress grade, which represents the target for the end of Key Stage. These target grades are based on data generated by Fischer Family Trust (FFT) for Key Stage 4 grades, and a combination of Oxford Analytics for Key Stage 5 grades. These are organisations which use national data to produce a target grade that is both realistic and aspirational for our students.

We also report home a predicted end of Key Stage grade at each of our assessment points, which is always ‘fine graded’ as below. This grade is based on the assessments which have been undertaken, marked and moderated in school, as well as the teachers’ expertise and experience of their students.

Sixth Form reports also include a written teacher comment as well as subject specific targets for how students can make further progress.

Attitude to Learning

In Key Stages 3 and 4, instead of a detailed comment we report home an ‘attitude to learning’ judgement which can be one of the following four categories for each subject area.

These are designed to represent the student’s typical attitude to learning during their lessons in each subject.