I don’t know a single teacher who enjoys report time.
It is a great opportunity to look back on the past term or semester and think about how far your students have come and where they are going next, but it has become more and more difficult for teachers to get them done.
Depending on what school you teach in, you might find that reports these days look quite different to even a few years ago. They often need to be done more frequently and they are becoming more structured; there are more and more rules about what teachers can and cannot say.
School reports are becoming impersonal.
Different schools are doing different things with reports.
Some are using just a grade, some are using just a comment. Yet others have a complicated system of drop-down menus to describe things like “organisation”, “engagement” or “learner behaviours”. There is one general trend though; teachers are getting less say in what they are allowed to include in a report.
Even if your reporting includes comments, there are often strict rules about what teachers can include. I’ve seen school reports where teachers needed to stick to a strict three-sentence format, with one sentence covering a criterion. They needed to use full names and not what they actually call the student and cannot include any kind of value statement like “good effort” or any terms that are up to interpretation like “work ethic”.
See more: 7 Weird But Genius Study Tips – Work Smarter, Not Harder.
These remove the personal aspect of reports. More teachers than ever before are finding pieces of comments that are acceptable and cut & paste instead of risking needing to re-do all of their personal, handwritten comments. Some schools even have a bank of comment snippets that they deem acceptable for teachers to pick from.
Private schools vs. public schools
I have heard about this happening less in private schools.
The reasons for this are complicated. Many private schools (unless they are a part of a partnership or religious organisation) act completely independently and can structure their reports however they want. This means that you often have greater variety and teachers voices can have a greater impact.
The other key difference is that private schools will often go to great lengths to build community and loyalty, and keep their students. The number of students that they have directly contributes to their bottom line and they want to keep customers.
This means that private schools do regularly have more personal reports. Their reports are a key piece of communication and connection to the school. It is where parents will really see if they are getting their money’s worth, and it is an opportunity for teachers to show how much they have done for their students. Because of this, comments like “Little Timmy is a pleasure to teach” or “Sammy is a delightful child with a lot of potential” are far more common, and would rarely be seen in today’s public schools.
What is the point of school reports?
The purpose of school reports varies depending on where you are and who you ask.
As mentioned above, many schools use them to keep parents paying their school fees. Other schools use them more as a formal record intended to be read by parents but used more by a student’s future teachers to get some history. Other schools simply want to make it as quick and easy for teachers as possible to fulfil the requirements placed on them.
The real consequences of this impersonal shift in reports may not be seen until a decade later.
The real impact that our reports have
A friend of mine is 35 years old, and they have recently been to a psychiatrist to try and get a diagnosis for ADHD.
She is a woman who went through school in the 90s and early 00s, and so no one considered ADHD when she was younger. She grew up being told that she was lazy and thought that she was smarter than everyone else. Her school reports often said things like “she has great potential but doesn’t hand in work on-time” or that “she would get better grades if she actually tried”. These are things that I know my school wouldn’t let me publish as a teacher.
These reports have been invaluable, though.
A big part of this process of getting diagnosed was proving that she has had these problems since she was a child, and these reports were a key part of this evidence.
She is clever, and she does wonderful things. Sometimes her executive function is bad enough to get ready to leave the house or feed herself. She would not be allowed to get the medication that she needs to do her job properly and look after herself without those reports.
Having reports that give a sanitised or watered-down truth about our students doesn’t serve them. It may be easier for parents to read and make them feel good inside, but these are a formal record of what a student is like at a particular period of time.
If any of my current students try to get an ADHD diagnosis in ten years time, I don’t know if they will be able to.
