Home Learning & Assessment

Home learning is an important part of our students’ education. Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) shows that effective home learning at secondary level can lead to an average of five months’ additional progress over the course of a year. Our home learning tasks are designed to reinforce classroom learning and help students embed knowledge securely in their long-term memory.

Students can expect regular home learning tasks from all subjects with the exception of Key Stage 3 PE and Key Stage 4 core PE. All of these tasks will appear on the Student Portal, and are also available for parents/carers on the My Child At School (MCAS) app.

Great assessment allows both students and teachers to continuously focus on knowledge gaps and understand specific areas where misconceptions have occurred or where more practice is needed.

Formal assessments during Key Stage 3 Assessment Week have been designed to prepare students for the style of summative assessment which they are likely to be tested by in the public exams at GCSE and A-Level. Students undertake two formal assessments per year. The assessments test the work which has been undertaken by that point in the year and the previous years of the key stage. For example, Year 8 Assessment Week in May will cover the content studied in Year 7 and the content from Year 8 up to April. When students move into the second year of a course (Key Stage 3, GCSE or A-Level), assessments will test material studied earlier on in the course. This is to practice the level of recall required in the public exams. Although these assessments have the style of summative assessments, they are used formatively as part of the learning feed-back loop.

To support the recall and revision for assessments at Key Stage 3, all subjects provide Knowledge Organisers that contain key vocabulary and content. We encourage students to use these to create flashcards or mind maps to help them recall the key information.

All Key Stage 3 students will sit summative assessments during Assessment Week. There will be two Assessment Weeks for Year 7 and Year 8; Year 9 will have three assessment periods to support their choice of GCSE subjects in March. Students will be graded a percentage mark on their assessments and the average mark for the year group will be shared with students and parents/carers in their reports. The highest mark in the year group will also be shared.

Key Stage 4 students taking GCSE are assessed by teacher assessment and graded 9 – 1 to mirror the GCSE 9 – 1 point scale. Grading of key assessments is robust using both published grade boundaries and grade distributions based on previous cohorts. In Key Stage 4 reporting, the numbers 9 – 1 are used to indicate both assessed and predicted grades. BTEC subjects are assessed using the appropriate scale of D* – P.

Sixth Form students are assessed by teacher assessment and graded to mirror the grading scale of the exam taken, A-Level A* – E, BTEC D* – P. Grading of key assessments is robust using both published grade boundaries and grade distributions based on previous cohorts.