Primary Tracker’s 2020 Evolution (so far)

Many of you have been in touch about the Primary Tracker, so we thought it was time to give you an update on its progress and how much it has changed since we last featured it here on the Product Blog.

Bromcom’s Primary Tracker now caters for 4 different assessment types: summative assessment, formative assessment, standardised tests and the Early Years Foundation Stage. I’ll go through each one in turn.

Summative Assessment

We’ve added some extra functionality to the marksheets to help give you more understanding of how your pupils have performed in their summative assessments.

You now have the option to add rows and columns that will show the grade totals and percentages. This is available on formative marksheets as well. These extra pieces of data will show you how many of each grade each student has attained, as well as an overall view for each subject. You will also be able to see how many students are at, above, or below the AREs from the marksheet, without the need to run any of the analysis reports. So, for example, you’ll be able to see how a group is performing in a subject by seeing how many students achieved each grade, and what that translates to in terms of the AREs that you have set.

We have also changed the gradebox for summative assessment. It will now show you a reduced selection of grades, based on the year group of the students who are in the marksheet. You can then choose to expand it if you want to select a grade from a different year group:

All marksheets now have additional filtering options on the column headers — just right-click the header to get the option to flood fill or filter. We’ve also increased the choice of extra columns you can add to the marksheets.

Formative Assessment

You now have the option to upload your own statements, if you don’t want to use the DfE’s statements. You can also assign statements to individual terms to create a programme of study. To set this up, follow the instructions on a new screen in the wizard and upload a spreadsheet which maps your statements to each term.

In the marksheet, you now have the option to add Summative Assessment columns, so you can make your Summative Assessment judgements based on students’ Formative Assessment results.

Standardised Tests

Since the last time we mentioned the Tracker on the blog, one of the biggest changes is the introduction of Tests. When setting up tests, you can choose whether you want to use standardised scores, and define your grade thresholds (ie what standardised score or raw score matches to which grade). If you want to perform question-level analysis, you can also map each question to a topic, which will allow you to analyse your pupils’ performance at a topic level — you can switch the marksheet view between “Marking” and “Analysis” to see the two different views.

Standardised Tests data can be viewed in the existing Attainment Overview, Prior Attainment Map, and Subject Triangulation analysis screens, as well as the new Primary Overview screen (which I’ll discuss later).

Early Years

We’ve also made a small tweak to Early Years recently. You can now select which age bands are relevant to your school. You can use this to define which formative statements are displayed in the marksheets and also to restrict the gradeset that is available to teachers. This functionality is optional, but does give you extra control over how your marksheets work, and what data is displayed in them.

Primary Overview

Finally, we’ve recently introduced a new analysis screen for the Primary Tracker called the ‘Primary Overview’. This screen allows you to see multiple different pieces of information from across the MIS on one screen.

You can bring in statutory assessment information, such as Phonics scores, EYFS scores, and KS1 results. You can then bring in results from the Primary Tracker’s Summative Assessment and Standardised Tests. All together, this provides an overview of how each of your pupils are performing across multiple assessment types. As usual you can export this data as well, in case you need to do more analysis in Excel.

What next?

As you can see, we’ve brought some significant improvements and upgrades to the Tracker this year, and we’re really excited to see how our customers use it in their schools. But we’re not finished with the Tracker yet! This summer we’re going to be introducing the idea of being able to create and manage individual targets that sit alongside the overall AREs. This will help schools better manage those pupils who are working outside of the curriculum, and will also give schools the ability to be more granular when monitoring and managing their pupils’ assessment. I think this feature is going to really elevate the Primary Tracker, and make it an immensely powerful tool.

I’ve tried to keep this blog entry as brief as I could, but there was a lot to cover — so I’m sorry if it was a bit of long read! If you want any further information about the Primary Tracker, please don’t hesitate to contact me at richard.king@bromcom.com.

Written by Richard King