Findings

Amesbury School achievement is consistently and significantly above national achievement.
Years 2 and 3 were a particularly strong cohort in reading with no students working below and a high proportion working above. These two year levels also had high numbers of students achieve above in writing and mathematics.
STAR achievement in reading is considerably higher than national norms with 28% of students achieving at stanine 9 compared with only 4% nationally achieving at stanine 9 (data table not supplied). Only 3% of students achieved in Stanines 1 – 3 (below) compared with 23% nationally.
2015 saw the highest number of students achieve above in mathematics in four years.
Significantly more boys are achieving above in mathematics than girls even though percentages “not yet achieving” are similar.
Several areas for attention surfaced:

Critical thinking in reading
Looking at how to effectively and valuably assess students who have already achieved a reading age of 14 – 15years.
A couple of year levels did not achieve quite as well as expected. These are being carefully monitored this year.
The ongoing need to explore the engagement of boys in writing.
A review of the reading and mathematics matrices is becoming urgent.

Conclusion

Across the board, students at Amesbury School are achieving well. However, the data was very useful in that it did draw attention to some areas for improvement. These and other areas for focus have been turned into objectives or goals in the School’s Annual Charter.

If you would like to know more, I have attached the following documents:

Achievement data for reading, writing and mathematics in 2015
Key activities in the Annual Plan for 2016

Please note - given that some of the cohorts are still quite small, only comparisons between boys and girls, and against the National Public Achievement Data for 2014, have been provided, to ensure that no individual students are able to be identified.

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