Report time, and not everyone happy

Jennifer Buckingham 13dec04

THE imminent arrival of the end-of-year report card causes dread in millions of households across the country, for the parents as much as for the children.

Parents expect to receive multiple-page reports on their children's achievements, with often vague descriptive terms instead of grades, and with graphs instead of class rankings.

If simply reading and making sense of the reports is a headache for parents, it is even worse for the teachers who have to write dozens of them, says Stephen Digby, a government school teacher and father of two teenagers.

Digby, Learning Technology Manager at Cheltenham Secondary College in Melbourne, says guidelines set down by the Victorian Government make it difficult for teachers to provide an accurate statement to parents about a child's performance.

"Each key learning area covers two school years. Students are graded on a three-level gradation that covers two years. Teachers also find it difficult because the grades are not on the basis of a test, but a balanced assessment over the whole period."

The three grades are "beginning", "consolidated" and "established", which can lead parents to believe that students are performing better than they actually are, Digby says.

"The language seems to have been invented specifically to befuddle and confuse parents," Digby says. "I would love to see A,B,C grades come back. In the VCE (Victorian Certicate of Education), kids are marked on a brutal numeric system. Everyone understands it and few people complain because they know there's no choice."

Victoria is the only state that has detailed guidelines for student reports. Next year, all states will provide literacy and numeracy test results against national benchmarks, but Western Australia and Tasmania will also move to establish common reporting formats for the whole curriculum.

Other states, including NSW and Queensland, are reviewing policies on student reports, but currently leave both format and content to the discretion of the school.

Mother of three Nina Berry, from Point Clare on the central coast of NSW, says that school reports in NSW are a "motley bunch". "It depends on the school. Some are instructive but some leave parents at a loss," she says.

Berry says she has seen reports where all the outcomes have been "cut-and-pasted" from the NSW syllabus into the report, which is too hard for parents to understand. But Berry does not favour a return to the A,B,C,D,E letter-grades or class rankings, as advocated in federal legislation passed by parliament this week.

Under the legislation, states and territories will be required to commit to ensuring that student reports meet a number of "principles", including that they be written in "plain English" and use simple grading systems such as letter-grades, class rankings and performance against state averages and national benchmarks where available.

"Parents want to know that their children are meeting national literacy and numeracy standards. They want plain English reports of their child's progress. Parents also need assurance that children are taught within a framework that fosters values important to Australian," says federal education minister Brendan Nelson.

Berry would be glad to to have her child's abilities explained in plain language, but thinks letter-grades do not give enough information.

"Parents want to know what their child should have learnt, and whether they have learnt it. It is no good knowing if your child is 2nd out of 27 in a class, when the whole class could be failing."

This sentiment is echoed by Sharryn Brownlee, president of the Federation of P&C Assocations in NSW, adding that what parents really want is consistency and a basis for comparison, such as state averages.

"We don't want overkill on reporting like 27 pages of outcomes that are top-heavy with teacher-speak," Brownlee says. "There has to be some kind of standard about what grades mean. People want honest information, and to be told what is being done to help their child if they're struggling."

The move away from grades has created pressure on teachers to write lengthy student reports. Preparing reports has become increasingly stressful for teachers, who have to come up with individual comments for each student in dozens of areas. There are even websites that provide teachers with ready-made comments for each subject area.

Digby believes the move toward vague descriptions rather than grades can be traced back to the creation of the school-based curriculum in the 1980s. "It was designed to give kids the 'opportunity to succeed' – an idea that is still deeply embedded in curriculum documents.".

He says at the school level this means pressure on teachers to adjust work to meet the ability of students, rather than have students fail.

Both Digby and Berry raise the timing of reports as a problem. All states and the Northern Territory require at least one written report to parents each year (the ACT has no compulsory reporting other than for literacy and numeracy).

In NSW when the only report has usually been at the end of the year, it is too late, says Berry. "We need information at a time of the year when you can do something about it."