Guest Posted July 11, 2004 Posted July 11, 2004 I struggled with producing the FSP as the end of term report to parents using the package provided by our LEA using SIMS. On Monday we sent home the reports. I had a parents evening on Thursday and had a very upsetting time with a particular set of parents. How can we stop the parents loking at what the child hasn't achieved and to point out the things they have! I find the profiles make one do this. You look for what hasn't been achieved. I had a child who had achieved on average 7/9 for each Early Learning Goals yet this was overlooked as 2 statements hadn't been achieved, therefore their child was only average! How do others deal with this? Is it therefore better to produce a seperate report for parents on 'report assist' for example?? Suggestions please?
Guest Posted July 11, 2004 Posted July 11, 2004 poor you, aliroberts! Filling in these FSP's is a thankless task where some parents are concerned. At our school we wrote a separate report that covered the six areas of the foundation stage curriculum. Our parents seemed happy about it as most are not impressed with the FSP anyway. I have the summer intake and some of the profiles already had a lot of information in them. Some of them were filled out incorrectly and I really didn't want to add my comments to those ones. Not a lot you can do about the parents and their attitudes apart from smile sweetly at them though gritted teeth! mousebat
Susan Posted July 12, 2004 Posted July 12, 2004 HI Ali, I think this is a really difficult one and the solution is one that you will have to make within your school. As you know is a statutory requirement to submit the profile scores and report them to parents. I think therefore, that you can give parents a total for each scale without actually detailling the exact points scored but I am not entirely sure and as I resigned with ill health I was not party to this in my school. The use of the booklet is optional, you can use alternative recording. If you are using the profile as your record keeper then it could make sense to send this to parents as the report, if not then the profile doc without comments is pretty meaningless, yet to fill them all by hand as a report is very time consuming. If you use the booklet to record keep it could be better used to transfer to yr1? If not how are you going to do this? I think I was favouring a traditional style report with statements indicating achieved goals, in the form ".... can ..." alongside a score for each curriculum area. Whether this would have been manageable or not I'm not sure and I'm assuming that the necessary staements are within the various report packages?
Guest Posted July 12, 2004 Posted July 12, 2004 Hi Ali, I'd suggest that you badger your LEA like mad to be allowed to use the E-Profiles next year. We did and were able to export all the info we'd put into the E-Profile software into Word which meant we were able to make the finished report look just how we liked. The finished document was six A4 sides (one for each area) plus a cover and a back page for a general comment and parent's comment. On each of the subject pages the E-profile automatically produced personalised statements outlining what the child had achieved eg in PSHE : Lucy has achieved the Early Learning Goals in this section. She dresses, undresses....etc etc. No mention of what is not achieved. I then put in my own comment perhaps mentioning an area that needed working on - the usual kind of thing. I also put a photo in for at least 4 of the different areas taken at some time over the last year of their child doing something within that area. The cover had a photo of the class plus the FSP logo, our school logo and the child's name. I had a day out of the classroom today to meet with the parents and 100% of them were thrilled with them. Thank goodness!! It was a lot of work but definitely worth the end result and next year, having done it once, we'll have more idea how to make the workload easier. I'm hoping that next year the software people will have made it possible to input photos as we go along as we had to wait until all our assessments had been done before we could export it and start adding our comments and photos. I hope that all makes sense! it's quite hard to describe it. Here's a link to the download site for the E-Profile. I'd suggest you d'load it and do a dummy run - you'll need some proper ch's names, UPN numbers and d of b's as it won't work without them. E-Profile downloads I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about it - either here or by email. Best wishes, Jess
Guest Posted July 12, 2004 Posted July 12, 2004 Thank you very much, am in talks with LEA about making life easier. Thank goodness for summer holidays and time to contemplate! x
Guest Posted July 12, 2004 Posted July 12, 2004 Hi Jesscia The e-profile sounds wonderful. You actually came across as enthusiastic! Unlike some of us who have not really enjoyed filling in the 'old-fashioned' paper documents. I'm glad the parents were happy too. mousebat
Guest Posted July 13, 2004 Posted July 13, 2004 Hi Mousebat, Hmmmm maybe if I'd responded to that post a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have come across as so enthusiastic as I was sick of the profiles and very unsure how they'd turn out! I don't think they took any less time than the pink booklets did last year, in fact they may have taken longer BUT the end result was sooooooo much better and so much better received by parents who, without exception, hated them last year! Jess
Guest Posted July 13, 2004 Posted July 13, 2004 Hi Jess I was just hoping against hope that there was something better than the paper booklets. You did come across as rather cheery! Must have been the temporary euphoria of having finished the FSP! By the sounds of it the effects don't last long I'm sorry you felt as bad as some of us here but you're at least amongst good company !!! mousebat
mundia Posted July 14, 2004 Posted July 14, 2004 Jessica, it certainly sounds like you got to grips with the eprofile, which we also used this year. We were led to believe that it would be the statutory method of reporting scores to the DFEE by 2006/7. Perhaps this has changed now. We found the eprofile quite straightforward once we got used to it, and the summaries are easily passed on to year 1 (not that they mean much to year one teachers as yet). I also find the graphs much easier to read. Unfortunaetly we also had to write reports in report assist as the Head wanted a whole school image, but I am hoping to persuade her to let us use the eprofile for the reports next year. Love the idea of adding photos.
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