Monitoring Progress
Concord’s outstanding teachers and tutors have access to a wealth of informative data about their students’ progress: this is updated regularly following weekly Saturday tests and monitored by Heads of Department, Heads of House and Heads of Year, as well as Senior staff.
This helps us ensure that our students are on track and allows us to put interventions in place quickly when they are required. Parents are informed with termly detailed reports from teachers in addition to weekly electronic updates about their children’s test performance.
“A student might think they have a bad result and we can reassure them if, for example all of the marks for that paper are lower.”
—Tutor
Saturday Tests
Saturday Tests are a weekly feature of Concord life. Each Saturday morning all of our students sit tests in some of their subjects. Tests are scheduled ahead for the term so students can plan their revision. One key benefit to Saturday tests is that teaching time in the week remains free from tests. Another is that the tests are arranged exactly as for an external exam, and so students become as comfortable as possible with examination procedure and the environment in which they will eventually sit their GCSEs or A Levels.
Teacher and Tutor support
Teachers and tutors have access to all of the Saturday test results for their students as well as aggregated data for the whole school. The information from Saturday tests is used by subject teachers to support student learning. Tutors also have access to the information and can use this to help students develop their study skills. Oversight by teachers, tutors and Heads of Year or Heads of House means that changes in students’ working are spotted and appropriate support can be offered.
“Being able to help a student analyse which revision techniques are effective for them is another bonus of the data we have”
—Concord Tutor
Reporting to Parents
Saturday test scores are usually made available to the student’s parents via a secure app.
Reports with information and comments from each subject, the student’s Tutor, their Head of House of Head of Year and a member of the Concord Senior Team are issued each term.
Students are given copies of their reports and encouraged to discuss it with their tutor.
This careful monitoring is also valuable for our Sixth Form Tutors in helping students to understand their academic performance and inform their choices of university.
