Assessing progress.

Assessment in our school and college is used as a tool to enhance learners progress, deepen knowledge, promote understanding, develop confidence, and key skills.

We use assessment to:

Establish the reality of our learners who join us in terms of their needs and prior attainment. This helps secure the evidence we use to determine their starting points with us.
Ensure that teaching, learning and additional support are matched to individual needs and that our learners are benefiting from a deep and rich educational experience
Help enable us to understand where learners are in their development, acquisition of knowledge and skills and the progress they make through their curriculum from their unique starting point with us
Help ensure that the curriculum we offer is both accessible as well as challenging and leads our learners to the best possible outcomes for them.

The key points we consider are:

The relevance of our assessments? Namely, do they enable us to understand how well learners are performing within their curriculum? Does the assessment enable us to evidence the progress that each learner has made?
Do our assessments provide meaningful insights? Does the data we collect enable and inform how effectively we support learning and establish attainment?
Are we using assessment data effectively? Critically, are we actioning the insights that assessments provide in order to ensure best possible outcomes for our learners?
What are other similar schools are doing in terms of assessment, we aim to identify opportunities to share practice as this helps us quality assure what we do.

Approaches we use:

We see assessment as an integral part of teaching, learning and individual curriculum development. It is inextricably linked to our curriculum and our learners’ ability to achieve the outcomes published in section E of their Education Health and Care Plans.

We use five broad overarching forms of assessment:

Initial baseline assessment by our therapeutic team
assessment of engagement with learning
day-to-day in-school formative assessment for learning
in-school summative assessment of learning
nationally standardised summative assessment.

Engagement with learning at Hamilton Lodge