Teach Secondary Issue 14.8

LOVE... Ann Fitzgerald, assessments officer and learning support manager at St George’s School, discusses the impact of Access Reading and Mathematics Tests WHY I ABOUT US: St George’s School is a non-selective day and boarding school for learners aged 11-18, located in Harpenden, Hertfordshire WILL IT WORK FOR YOU? • Print or digital tests measure skills and identify areas of improvement • Compare learners against cohort at a school and national level • Parallel assessments measure progress and the impact of targeted teaching • Next-step interventions available, driven by ART/AMT results TALKING ABOUT: HACHETTE LEARNING’S ART & AMT ASSESSMENTS Howdo you use the tests? At St George’s School, we’ve found the ART and AMT interactive assessments to be useful tools, particularly for screening students in Y9. We also use the paper versions for individual in-year entries and for interventions. What impact have they had? Using ART and AMT tests to screen Y9 has been very helpful. This gives us a consistent assessment point and useful information between the key stages. It helps address any concerns from parents, too. We don’t share detailed results with students or parents, but we do communicate whether students’ reading and maths test results are in line with expectations for their age. We use the assessments to support access arrangements as part of our assessor evidence. The standardised scores, reading and maths ages are helpful indicators. If a student is performing significantly below age expectations, then we investigate further using additional assessments. What has the process been like? The online versions of the tests are very straightforward to use, and save time on marking. This year we ran the online assessments in our computer suites during timetabled computing lessons and distributed the links via Google Classroom. While the process is generally smooth, monitoring can be more difficult than in the school hall, where we would do the paper tests with students sat further apart from each other. The ease of the online tests providing results immediately, though, probably outweighs this concern, and we are aware that we’ll have to monitor some students carefully. [The reporting platform is] easy to navigate, and syncing with SIMS was straightforward. Adding any additional students manually was also easy, as was allocating extra time within the online test time for those who needed it. We haven’t needed to contact Hachette’s digital support, but we did use the online help pages for a step-by-step guide to downloading the reports into Excel. Would you recommend the tests? ART and AMT are amongst my favourite tests for effectiveness, and if budget allows, I will be considering extending the screening to more year groups. Based on our experience, I would recommend both ART and AMT tests to other schools. Contact: hachettelearning. com/consultants PA R T N E R C O N T E N T 48 teachwire.net/secondary