Developing a Link between Parents, Schools and Children

Keeping abreast of how your child’s education is progressing can be difficult. Online assessment service Right2Learn provides fun, multi-choice tests that can be carried out at school or at home giving a clear record of development.

Words Caroline Hardy, Courier Media Group

It’s the same old question – with busy lifestyles and long hours in stressful jobs, how can you devote the time to fully monitor your child’s progress at school?
Whether it’s a quick glance at nightly homework or the termly visit to parents’ evening for a half-hour ‘de-briefing’, there never seems to be enough hours in the day to keep an eye on everything. No wonder many parents feel guilty about not spending sufficient time keeping up to date with their child’s progress, let alone uncovering any weak points that could be addressed.

Using the rapid response offered by the internet, an online facility that links teachers and parents through pupils has been helping transform the way primary school children’s educational development can be monitored.

The Right2Learn online assessments resource allows parents to monitor the development of their children’s children’s achievements through multi-choice tests that are as much fun as they are relevant.

Online assessments are provided for primary years 1 to 6 in the key national curriculum subjects of English, maths and science.

 The Right2Learn company was set up six years ago by a former teacher and father-of-five Shaun Micallef-Green, of Ashford, in response to the lack of information he felt he was getting about the progress of one of his daughters at school.

“She was struggling with English and I wanted to know from her teachers how we could help her,” he says. “I talked to them but never got any specific helpful information, except for the suggestion that I could, perhaps, help her with her reading.”

“Setting up Right2Learn was born out of a sense of frustration that something needed to be developed that would support teachers and parents in helping to realise the individual potential in children.”

“The concept of delivering the system over the internet was that it made this connection between the teacher, parent and child. In a way, the child is the consumer, as he or she uses the system. The test is immediately assessed, and the report is then used to tailor that information to the child’s needs.”
Right2Learn is being used nationally with a steady uptake in many areas. In Kent there are about 80 schools using the system. In Essex around 30, with other schools in Surrey signed up too. Many recommendations come by word of mouth.

“One headteacher in Essex took up the system and within a few months, 11 more had also adopted it.” Shaun says. Last year the company released new assessments matched to the Government’s revised primary framework, and in December 2008 it trebled the amount of its content from 2,000 to 6,000 questions.

“The system provides children with a way of assessing progress and identifying their specific needs, while contributing to their personalized learning,” Shaun adds. “For teachers it demonstrates value added over several years. A headteacher can see the progress being made and have a much clearer picture of overall problems.”

“It is a nice, user-friendly of informing and involving parents. And it works.”

To make this point, Shaun illustrated how illustrates how the system benefited one parent he spoke to recently. “She had worked as a teaching assistant for three years and her daughter was in Year 1.

“The mother felt the school was not aware of her ability, which she thought was greater than the other children in the class, and she believed the child should be working with Year 2.

“She felt something needed to be done otherwise her child would get bored and drift. I told her about Right2Learn and she gave her daughter some of the assessments. The mother returned to the school with the results as evidence that her daughter needed a more challenging learning environment.
“The tests empowered the parent to discuss her child’s future development and needs.”

One of the schools that has benefited from the system is Pluckley CE Primary School, near Ashford, which has 177 pupils with mixed age and year groups across Key Stages 1 and 2.

Head-teacher Richard Rule subscribed to Right2Learn in September 2005, following a referral from several other local schools using the service.
Lindsay Roberts, the school’s deputy head-teacher, describes it as “a fantastic resource”.

She says: “We have found it straight forward to use and extremely flexible. It is a very useful tool to support on-going teacher assessments.
“You can see individual children’s levels and set differentiated tests based on their true ability.

“The Right2Learn staff are easily contactable and readily available to deal with any issues either remotely or onsite.”

The initial expectations were that the service would be used to address the difficulties in accurately identifying learning needs and tracking progress in maths, through a consistent and reliable means. It was also hoped that staff would be able to use the analysis outcomes to influence children’s progress.

“It is very child- and adult – friendly, and the children love taking the tests, even wanting to take more,” says Lindsay. “The teacher administration pages are easy to navigate, with the spreadsheets of results providing instant information showing what the children have achieved.”

“We quickly realized we could do a lot more with the resource,” she says. “The online assessments have enabled us to accurately measure and demonstrate added value, and it has exceeded all our expectations. The more we use it, the better it gets.”

(© Courier Media Group)

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