Mathematics Framework

Assessment and target setting

As pupils come to terms with their new school, it is essential to continue to build their mathematical skills. Year 7 teachers need to know what their pupils can already do. Many pupils now leave Year 6 with personal targets, records and a history of intervention. This body of information can help secondary teachers to make a quick start on work that is well matched to pupils' capabilities. The 'clean-sheet' approach is too slow, and allows pupils to coast or to fall back when they need to be challenged. As a minimum, teachers of Year 7 classes should survey the information available to them about the mathematical attainment of incoming pupils to help plan in advance the work of the first term, and then review individual records more closely when staff have had three or four weeks of experience with individual pupils. This alerts them to unexpected changes in performance which need to be resolved and enables them to adjust teaching expectations accordingly.

Priorities for each new cohort can be derived from Key Stage 2 levels and raw scores and the qualitative information provided by work sampling and other monitoring in the early part of Year 7. This helps the department to translate wider ambitions such as 'improve number skills' first into numerical targets such as 'increase by 5% the proportion of pupils achieving Level 4 in number and algebra by the end of Year 7', then into specific curricular targets such as 'all pupils will recognise the equivalence of simple fractions, decimals and percentages' or 'all pupils will use the order of operations, and know that algebraic operations follow the same conventions and order as arithmetic operations'.

Assessment, recording and reporting are important elements of teaching but they have to be manageable if the information they yield is to be useful. The best assessment has an immediate impact on teaching, because it alerts you to the needs of pupils who are either out of step or exceeding expectations. Assessment should help to maintain the pace of learning for all pupils by informing teaching plans, in a continuous cycle of planning, teaching and assessment.

It is useful to consider assessment at three connected levels: short-term, medium-term and long-term.