As a former primary teacher who spent hours and hours writing end of year pupil reports, I couldn’t be more excited about our new Learning Ladders feature.
This was planned anyway, but we’ve pushed launch forward in light of COV19 and the new need to collaborate remotely to create reports, as well as share them online (both simple with our system).
When we looked at this our starting point was simple.
Wouldn’t it be great if end of year pupil reports were;
- Simple, quick and joyful for teachers to create
- Highly personalised, capturing granular details for each child
- Useful and meaningful for pupils and parents
Teachers report on average spending 35+ hours on their reports
– that’s 5 full working days!!
Yet at the same time parents bemoan formulaic impersonal reports, cry foul on typos and grammar slip-ups, and woe betide any teacher getting Matt from 1A muddled with any of the 12 other Matt’s in Y1!
Consequently it’s a minefield for all parties, a huge drain on resources, and quite clearly an area that needs improvement.
So, we decided a few months back to tackle it, and we’re really keen to find out what you all think!
Learning Ladders already knows every individual pupil’s achievements and gaps across all subjects, and we already communicate these to parents during the term – so parents are already far better informed than in my time in schools.
But what if we can take all that information, have the system do the heavy lifting of identifying key achievements and key areas for development, automating links to portfolios and tutorials, so all the teachers have to do is focus on the most important and meaningful elements, the personal comments? (And we’ve even automated that for you if you wish!)
As with everything in Learning Ladders it’s easy to completely customise to your own school. It works like this:
- Add your school logo
- Choose the subjects to include
- Choose any additional information you want to add (literally anything!) – school values perhaps?
The system will then automatically:
- Pull in the key achievements of each child for each subject into their report
- Suggest areas to work on next for each subject for each child
- Add their portfolio (assuming T’s have used this during the year)
- Allow Teachers and Pupils to add pre-written or custom comments
- Email the draft report(s) to SLT for comment, sign-off or to suggest revisions
- Automatically publish every report to parents at the click of a button, and make each report available to parents in any of 107 different languages
Parents will get:
- Highly personalised feedback for their child
- Links to Portfolios of work to bring this to life
- Links to our Learning Ladders Parent Tutorials so they can support learning at home
- The ability to share End of Year Pupil report with friends and family, as a pdf file
The BETA version of this is now available for ALL Learning Ladders members, just email support@learningladders.info to activate it.
And if you’re not yet a Learning Ladders member we’re here to support you too. We’ll be adding it to the free support package, which you can apply for here.
I’d love to know what you think.
Matt Koster-Marcon
Matt is a former teacher and Founding CEO of Learning Ladders. He’s also Chair of EdTech at the British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), Co-Founder of the EdTech Evidence Group, a member of the DfE Covid Curriculum (Resources) panel, and guest speaker at Roehampton University in London.
