Monitoring performance at secondary

[silverysea]

I loathe smoking having listened to my dad cough and cough, he told me when I was an earnest 12 year old trying to make him quit, that he didn't WANT to live longer.

He's 78 and now has COPD, wheezes and struggles to breathe. Still smokes.

I'm sure we can't do this at our school, we have no passwords etc and so I was interested what other schools have. Would only grammars do this? This is a comp.

Anyway, I will ask the form tutor at the risk of getting in trouble with dd for interfering. There is never anything in her planner, except the odd cryptic scribble by herself, and rarely much in her books-she behaves well and gets ok marks with little effort so they are satisfied-I am not. Also books are sometimes being marked or more likely left in locker at school, or lost.

[DC17C]

They have system called IRIS at my ds's school but it only record merits and detentions. We get level updates on a bit of paper every term I think often but need to frisk DS's bag/ search among the empty crisp packets to find them.

[silverysea]

Thanks, that is a start isn't it? We just started to get termly updates in December. Which is a step forward from being told she had made no progress in one subject all year at the end of the year. Still no progress as of December- same teacher, I'm told by dd they don't see eye to eye and she's dropping it for GCSE, which annoys me but I've got bigger fish to fry. I lost that battle!

I found this on a website of another Local comp.

"Parents, guardians and families play an essential role in the education of children, and X School recognises this. Our new Virtual Learning Environment, "name" has facilities for all parents to monitor their child's attendance and progress."


Even if you don't need or use it, how many parents have this sort if access to school progress at secondary?

Perhaps I should look for that parent OFSTED feedback thingy, anyone used that?

[Okanagan]

Ours uses Insight for this.

[silverysea]

That looks good, does your school do the homework too?

[kenyancowgirl]

Lol!! No...the kids have to do that!!!

[silverysea]

Oooh! I suspect you KNOW I meant does the system SHOW what homework the diligent little darlings are meant to do/have done, as promised on it's webpage?

So have schools just provided this unasked to the bewildered parents, or have pushy parents demanded that bemused schools provide it?

Or are there unseen forces behind it, mwah ha ha (big brother rubs hands)

[KS10]

Didn't know this existed. As far as I'm aware, DC's school does not have this facility.

[ToadMum]

DS1 and DD's school has SLG (Sims Learning Gateway). We can log on to check that their personal details are correct (and correct them if they are not), check attendance records and look at their reports. There is scope for other things to be added. DS1's details have a nice photo of him attached. DD's don't - she went along to the "new joiners" photo session, but I think she said that the lady forgot to ask her name .

I keep meaning to tell someone at the school about that. As far as I am aware, the editing facility doesn't stretch to uploading your own...

[Okanagan]

Oooh! I suspect you KNOW I meant does the system SHOW what homework the diligent little darlings are meant to do/have done, as promised on it's webpage?

Indeed it does.

So have schools just provided this unasked to the bewildered parents, or have pushy parents demanded that bemused schools provide it?

Don't really know the history of it - it was already in place when ds started there. But it is quite good. I was impressed the other day with the simplicity parents of evening arrangements using it - you just log in to it and it comes up with a list of your child's teachers, and the available slots. You just pick your slots and it's all booked automatically, then the slots which have gone aren't listed for subsequent people logging in. You get a nice little summary list of what you've booked to print out, and of course the teachers get their appointments list generated automatically. So much simpler than trying to get the kids to put names down on multiple pieces of paper and keep track of what slots have been booked with who.