SLT pathway, Level 3

Outcome: Understand possibilities for sharing with parents and identified school approach

Why it matters: You will have begun to have a great deal of assessment information held in Classroom Monitor and a key group of people who will be interested in this is parents. There are a number of tools built into the system that will help you to share with parents easily and effectively.

Time to complete: 20 minutes


Why do we want to share with parents?

It’s a statutory duty for schools to share various things with parents in the period since their last report was sent. They must share the achievements, general progress and attendance record of each pupil, and this should be done at least annually. Ofsted also emphasises the sharing of ‘clear and timely information on how well their child is progressing and how well their child is doing in relation to the standards expected. Parents are given guidance about how to support their child to improve.’


Obviously, there’s many other reasons to share information with parents rather than just to meet a statutory duty or an Ofsted requirement! Parents are key partners in pupils’ education. They want information about their child because they care about them and want to check that they’re doing OK. They also want to be able to support their child, academically, socially and behaviourally, and the information that teachers share with them helps them to do that.


Approaches to reporting to parents

Traditionally, the most common way of sharing information with them has been the written annual report; often a lengthy, printed document that is hand delivered by pupil to parent. But we’re now talking to many schools who are finding it beneficial to send more frequent, shorter reports. This has a number of advantages including engaging with parents at key points throughout the year and reducing the amount of information in, and time required to write, the annual report.


Using Classroom Monitor to report to parents

Sharing with parents can seem an arduous task for teachers; requiring a lot of time spent reviewing individuals’ achievements and progress in order to write or give verbal comments to parents. To combat this workload, Classroom Monitor has a number of tools to make reporting much easier and much quicker. Reports can be simply generated using the rich assessment information that teachers have already recorded within the markbooks; significantly reducing the workload requirements.


There are three report types available in Classroom Monitor:


Define your strategy

Decide when in the year you will share your Classroom Monitor information with parents and the format in which you will do it. This should be shared with staff to give them the opportunity to plan their workload and check that all of their assessment information is in the best possible format for those times.