A Fresh Start

So, September has rolled around again. However, this isn’t your usual September. The way schools are approaching this return to school is different to any year that has gone before, and this may also be the case for your use of Incerts.

​As you will already know, yearly progress on Incerts is measured based on where pupils were assessed to be at the end of the previous year. However, it is quite possible that the assessments currently held on your Incerts aren’t an accurate reflection of what pupils are currently capable of, due to the period of enforced school closure and home schooling from March to June this year. For a number of pupils there will be skills that have been developed further during their time at home, due to the herculean efforts made by their teachers, providing the resources and support to ensure that learning continued. This, alongside the effort and attention put in by parents and guardians will hopefully have ensured that pupils continued to develop their skills throughout.

On the flipside, there will be other skills that may not have been looked at since March, and so those skills have been lost and need to be re-taught. Indeed, it is suggested in this article from the BBC that pupils may well be three months behind in their learning as a direct result of the enforced lockdown. As such, you will not want any ‘lost’ skills to be ticked on Incerts, as this will be misleading when you are using the system to inform lesson planning for the Autumn term.

All of this means that, in order to ensure that you have an accurate measure of progress for this year, you will want to update your assessments based on what you are observing in the classroom over the coming weeks, ahead of rolling the system forward to the new academic year. We recommend that you spend some time observing your pupils, identifying what they can and can’t do, and then amend the assessments on Incerts to make sure that you have an accurate starting point for recording progress. Then, when you roll forward, these amended assessments will show as an end of year assessment, and you can guarantee that the progress shown on the system from that point on will be accurate.

Of course, it is likely that you will have given some considerable thought to all of these issues yourselves, and you may have a different approach in mind for how you can surmount them. Rest assured that, however you intend to do this, we will be on hand to assist you in any way we can. So, if you need our help to show you how to un-tick boxes, or for any other part of the process, please get in touch.

Dan O’Dell, Support Team