Performance

In order to place a student on the correct academic pathway, pupils are assessed on entry and during key times throughout the year. This allows the school to make an informed decision in regard to the students ability as well as helping to identify potential 'barriers to learning'. This holistic approach enables the school to effectively monitor pupil progress as well as helping us to identify the additional support needed for individual or groups of pupils.

The comprehensive assessment process as outlined below allows the school to allocate a pupil to a correct 'learning pathway'. This pathway ensures the school can make 'like for like' comparisons with similar pupils nationally. It also informs the process of streaming pupils according to academic ability and gives teachers a more thorough overview of each pupils learning needs. This is achieved not just through assessment but using the Educational Health Care Plan (EHC Plan) to help build a profile of each pupil.

When all this information is gathered. Pupils will then be placed on a particular learning pathway and outcome targets are generated according to the pupils ability, starting points and the expected progress made by similar pupils nationally. The table below illustrates each pathway and the outcome measures pupils are working towards.  

How do we measure progress?

A school’s Progress 8 score is calculated as the average of its pupils’ Progress 8 scores. It gives an indication of whether, as a group, pupils in the school made above or below average progress compared to similar pupils in other schools.

• a score of zero means pupils in this school on average do about as well at key stage 4 as other pupils across England who got similar results at the end of key stage 2

• a score above zero means pupils made more progress, on average, than pupils across England who got similar results at the end of key stage 2

• a score below zero means pupils made less progress, on average, than pupils across England who got similar results at the end of key stage 2.

How well do pupils at SMS perform overall?

At St Mary’s we use an auditing tool called FFT to help us evaluate pupil progress. The graphs and tables below indicate that pupils at St Mary’s make above average progress when compared to similar pupils nationally.