Katie Fisher, ICT Coordinator
Hanbury CE First School, Worcestershire
"The real time reporting of Right2Learn is genuinely empowering for teachers and pupils. This is an invaluable assessment resource, which has helped create a positive link with our parents via the home use learning features."
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Right2 Learn Case Study
Background
Hanbury CE First School in Worcestershire is a rural school with just 103 pupils, five teaching staff, and one class per year group.
The school has an established reputation for high performance in end of unit assessments, but the process of assessment from start to finish was very time consuming.
For each of the four key subjects (English, Maths, Science and IT) teachers at the school were creating assessments for the end of each unit from scratch. Then each assessment was being manually marked to ascertain the results. The results were then transferred to the assessment sheets provided by the county for recording results. Added to which, any additional analyses of assessment results required manual entry of the results on to a spreadsheet.
Why did you choose Right2Learn?
Katie Fisher, the ICT and NFL coordinator for Hanbury first became aware of the Right2Learn service when it was demonstrated at the ICT conference staged by the Worcestershire LEA in March 2005. Katie's immediate impression was that the service appeared easy to implement, was well supported by an enthusiastic and responsive team, and would meet the need to alleviate the workload of the school's existing assessment process. Hanbury CE First school subsequently invested in a three year subscription to the Right2Learn online assessment for learning service at the Education Show in March 2005.
How easy was it to implement?
Hanbury began using Right2Learn in the middle of an academic year with a view to running it as a test to ensure they got the best from the system in 2005 - 2006.
Katie says, "As soon as we'd made the investment the implementation was really easy. I simply sent over a list of our pupils' names and the passwords were set up in no time meaning we could get to work with it straight away. As and when new children have joined the school later in the year it has only taken a phone call to get them set up on the system." The user friendliness of the system for teachers and pupils means once it was installed Hanbury was up and running without a hitch.
What do you do with the results?
Katie reports that "The children enjoy getting instant results on the assessments, coupled with the opportunity to go back over their work. Where even more work is required we get the parents involved who log on with their children at home."
To help the parents at home Right2Learn includes several examples of assessments to test identical skills coupled with guidance notes.
For the teachers the results are instantly fed on to an excel spreadsheet so they can see overall and individual strengths and weaknesses. Katie comments "Before we implemented Right2Learn each of us had to sit and mark 27 or so assessments after the event, which made it difficult to do anything about over or underperformance. The real time reporting is genuinely empowering for teachers and pupils as we can respond when everything is still fresh in the children's minds."
And for children above or below the average, Right2Learn enables teachers to differentiate by delivering assessments to them from other year groups. Importantly, children are not aware that the assessments are from other year groups. Katie describes the levelling as "brilliant" as it gives her a clear indication of where each child is working and she is using the information to generate a handover report for the next years' teacher to enable her to plan her lessons around the pupils' abilities.
And Hanbury does not simply use Right2Learn as an internal tool. Every child's results go for regional reporting.
How does the Right2Learn service benefit your school?
Immensely! After only one year of implementation, Hanbury is successfully using assessments across all four subjects and the school makes full use of the system to:
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reduce the time taken for setting, marking and acting on the results of assessments
- set progressive objectives throughout each term
- monitor individual pupil progress through the levelling functionality
- involve and support parents
- create tailored assessments for pupils according to need
- assess school-wide progress by recording the levels on one page from all years
- make regional reports of the school's performance
Head Teacher: "Right2Learn is an invaluable resource for assessing the children. It is very child friendly (and adult friendly too!) and the children love taking the tests; even wanting to do more. The teacher administration pages are easy to navigate, with the spreadsheets of results providing instant information showing what the children have achieved. Being able to send the passwords home has helped create a positive link with our parents, who appreciate the opportunity to work with their children on the objectives. We would recommend Right2Learn to any primary school."
Katie adds, "The level of service from Right2Learn has been excellent. Every time we have a query they respond and resolve it immediately."
View a full teacher demonstration of the service>>
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