More transparent, holistic pupil assessment at St Bernadette's primary

St Bernadette's Primary School in San Gwann has introduced a new, more transparent assessment system, with the focal point being a new pupil progress report, called a 'Record of Achievement'.

The new approach encourages children, parents and teachers to be more reflective and gives a holistic picture of the child. Last year, it definitely helped the children to boost their ego and encouraged them to better understand their own performance.

The new system is the fruit of a Comenius school development project entitled "Quality Assurance through a Synergy of Assessment" that St Bernadette's is involved in with schools from Belgium, Italy, Poland and Norway.

The 'Record of Achievement' focuses both on the pupils' academic progress as well as on the pupils' social development skills. An added feature in the progress report is that the teacher and the parent have to sign and write a comment. The report features a photo of the child fixed on the first page, and the child also signs and writes his own comments on his progress and achievement.

All the stakeholders, including the senior management team, teachers, facilitators, pupils and parents were involved in the process mainly through questionnaires and interviews.

The final version of the 'Record of Achievement' is still subject to change and it is still undecided whether to use one report for an entire three-year period or one for each year. After seeing it work in a school in Oslo, we have decided that the child should be present when the teacher fills in the report, so that if the child has any queries they can be dealt with there and then.

During a project partners' meeting held in November last year in Belgium, the first sample of the report booklet was presented and a few changes were made. The amended version of the report was introduced in our school last February and the "finalised" version was presented last May in Oslo to the other school heads, project co-ordinators and participants, and it was welcomed by all concerned.

During our several project meetings in European countries, we were also given the opportunity to visit primary schools and even participate in lessons held in English and attend others held in the countries' native language. During these visits, we discussed with the school heads their own assessment procedures and the strengths and weakness of such systems.

The project has been a fruitful experience and we would like to encourage all educators to participate in similar projects. By means of these wonderful experiences we shared our ideas with other European teachers and in so doing we have broadened our ideas and ways of teaching. We are now looking forward to the final meeting to be held in May next year in Malta when we will be hosting the foreign partners who will be acting as 'critical friends' to the system adopted in our school.

We would finally like to thank Mary Rose DeBono, our head of school and co-ordinator of the project, the Education Division and the European Commission for financially supporting the project.