Welsh Government has yet to stipulate its expectations regarding assessment within the Curriculum For Wales 2022.
It's essential that as a school, you decide how, when, why and what you will 'assess' or 'measure', taking into account the workload of your teachers, whilst ensuring you have accurate, clear and informative data to share with your stakeholders.
Creating an assessment policy
You should discuss in school what your aims are for assessment, and how your school wants to meaningfully integrate curriculum delivery and assessment for learning. We've produced a model assessment policy to help you set out your arrangements for the governance, management and evaluation of assessment in your school. Download a copy from the library.
Marking, coverage and attainment
If used correctly, Maestro can save teachers a lot of time by gathering information and evidence about pupils on a daily basis that will help inform ongoing and summative assessments. To enable this to happen, the Senior Leadership Team should have already completed the following steps:
- Added classes and pupils and assigned them to teachers.
Teachers should plan lessons using their timetable, or via My lessons (read more about Planning options) and 'Assess' or 'Mark as taught' the lessons at regular intervals to ensure accurate attainments are noted. Clicking 'Taught' not only allows teachers to mark attainments against classes, pupils and learning groups but also tracks actual coverage of your curriculum, including any discrete lessons that teachers have created themselves.
- Read more about marking lessons as taught here.
Ongoing assessment and actual coverage
Schools should be continually monitoring actual coverage, that informs teachers and leaders in real time as to where their children are and what is needed to support them to be the best that they can be. Each time a teacher uses the 'Taught' or 'Assess this lesson' button, the objectives that have been taught are added to the Actual coverage screen.
Actual coverage
Actual coverage allows you to analyse and report on AoLE coverage and outcomes at an individual, class or whole school level. This gives teachers and senior leaders a live picture of how children are progressing through school and where the strengths and gaps are, to inform your action plans.
- Read more about Actual coverage here.
Track pupil progress
To keep track of whether pupils are working towards the expected standard, you may choose to use the 'Simple' options in the Track pupil progress tool. At any time throughout the term, you can mark a pupil as 'On track' or 'Not on track' based on the objectives they have been taught and what they have achieved.
- Read more about Track pupil progress here.
Cornerstones Tests
Cornerstones have created tests for all year groups from Year 1 to Year 6 that are designed in a similar way to the English SATs papers to help prepare children for national testing. We know some schools in Wales find these helpful and so have included them in the Cwricwlwm Maestro content.
These tests can be found in the Library on Maestro, and come with a range of tools to support gap analysis, and reporting. These scores can be added to the Teacher Assessment area to help teachers make an informed summative judgement at the end of each term.
Summative assessment
Summative assessments should be done in line with your school Assessment policy. The Track pupil progress page pulls together all the information that has been tracked throughout the year for each class and pupil to allow teachers to make an informed judgement at the end of each term and/or year.
- Read more about Track pupil progress here.