Pedare Christian College students to write their own school reports for parents every five weeks

Students at an Adelaide school will be writing reports on their own performance for their parents every five weeks, delivered to mums and dads online.

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Students at an Adelaide school will be writing reports on their own performance for their parents every five weeks, delivered to mums and dads online.

Pedare Christian College students in Years 6-12 will take more responsibility for their academic achievement by writing reports on their progress in their weakest three or four subjects. Class time will be allocated for the task.

The Golden Grove independent school says students don’t bother to read teachers’ comments on traditional end of semester report cards, labelling them “archaic and after the fact”. Its parent surveys and focus groups show that adults don’t read them either.

While it stresses report cards will stay because they are a twice-a-year legal requirement, the school is also moving to a real-time reporting model next year.

Many schools already use online portals and apps to report results of tests and assignments to parents quickly, and alert them to due dates for upcoming ones. Pedare’s will go further by using sophisticated data analytics, constantly tracking not just academic performance, but attendance and wellbeing measures as well.

Head of middle school Lauren Brooks said that meant the cross-referencing system could flag concerns about individual students that will be acted on immediately with extra supports – not when it’s too late at the end of a term or year.

Asked if too much monitoring would prevent students becoming independent and disciplined in their study, Ms Brooks said there would be a balance between support and letting kids be “leaders of their own learning journey”.

Experts last week called for traditional report cards to be scrapped nationally. They said they were pointless, as swamped teachers were relying on software with drop-down menus of generic comments.

SA Secondary Principals Association president Peter Mader said at least half of public high schools used parent portals for real-time communication with parents, and most used them for updates on academic progress as well as day-to-day details on things like excursions.

Catholic Education SA director Neil McGoran said the same was true of many of its schools, which had also introduced sessions of “student-led learning conversations” with their parents “that measure the effectiveness and quality of learning”.

As well as grades, he said learning was about traits such as confidence and critical thinking that were “not necessarily best measured in the traditional report card”.

Association of Independent Schools of SA chief executive Carolyn Grantskalns said it was “not uncommon” for schools to update assessment data regularly on parent portals.