Here at Incerts we're proud to announce the release of Incerts 2013. We make significant changes to the look and feel of Incerts every year – we're committed to making life easier for teachers in England and Wales, so we're always thinking of ways to improve the existing system and to make Incerts easier to use. We receive some great suggestions from our schools for ways we can improve the system; in fact some of the changes we've made this year are the direct result of suggestions from our schools. Here are some of the most significant changes for 2013…

We've received a lot of excellent feedback from schools about the notes feature and how useful it is for capturing evidence, so we've given it a brand new interface to make it easier to add files and text. You can now add files from your computer, or from our new Snap App.

The way that our sublevel outputs behave has now changed so that when you apply a filter (to view boys or girls only, for example), the percentage summary will now update accordingly. This will make it easier to analyse the performance of vulnerable groups.

There's good news this year for schools that use Incerts through the medium of Welsh: we've now translated all of our spreadsheets into Welsh which will be particularly useful when presenting data to Welsh-speaking governors, LAs or inspectors.

We've made a number of other improvements throughout the system, but like the significant changes that have been made to the Reports page, they’ll become relevant later in the school year.

We're delighted to announce that Incerts Snap, a free app for iPhone, iPod and iPad, is now available to download from the App Store. Incerts Snap allows teachers who use the Incerts assessment system to capture photos and video/audio clips to support their judgements.

Teachers can log in to Incerts Snap using their normal school password, initials, and teacher password; or they can use demo passwords available from Incerts Support. Photos and short video/audio clips, "Snaps" as we're calling them, can be stored securely on the device, uploaded to the Incerts servers, or directly attached to a pupil's Notes.

If you want to trial the app but don’t have you own login, you can use the following details:

WALES: School Password, ’Snap555‘, Teacher Initials ‘JS’, Teacher Password ‘secret‘
ENGLAND: School Password, ’Snap444’, Teacher Initials ‘JS’, Teacher Password ‘secret’

Teachers can use Incerts Snap to record assessments against the National Curriculum Level Descriptors of England (or the APP guidelines) or of Wales (or the Foundation Phase Outcome Descriptors). The app will also support the upcoming Foundation Stage Profile for England and the Literacy and Numeracy Framework for Wales shortly after they are made available by government.

Our handy How to Use Incerts Snap guide is available from our resources area and you can download Incerts Snap from the App store using the link below:

What’s Happening? Following the 2011 Tickell Review, the 2008 Early Years Foundation Stage has now been replaced in England by a new statutory framework. The statutory assessment at the end of 2012/2013 will be made using “EYFS Profile 2012”, supported by exemplification material to help teachers make accurate judgements about each child’s level of attainment.

What’s the Problem? Although this new framework has now been published, the resources to support it are still “evolving”—the DfE’s way of telling us it’s not finished! Crucially, the EYFS Profile 2012 and the exemplification material have not yet been revealed, so nobody really knows how children will be assessed at the end of this year.

Can we Baseline Children Now? You can still record assessments against the old profile in Incerts this year, or indeed any other way. However, if a “baseline” is understood strictly, as an initial measurement that can be subtracted from a final measurement on the same profile to calculate progress, then no, you can’t. It’s extremely unlikely that the new profile will be similar enough to the old one to allow meaningful comparison between measurements made on each.

What about “Development Matters”? The first rule of Development Matters is: you do not use its development statements as a checklist; the second rule of Development Matters is: you do not use its development statements as a checklist. Although it’s a useful document for diagnosing developmental delay and for planning, it cannot provide a baseline assessment for the EYFS Profile 2012; just as it couldn’t for the EYFS Profile 2008 that preceded it.

What will Incerts do? Incerts currently supports the Bright Profile, a hierarchically-structured and extended version of the EYFS Profile 2008, and will now continue to do so until the end of 2012/2013. When the EYFS Profile 2012 is published, we’ll add it to Incerts as an alternative, which means schools will be able to choose to use one profile or the other but not both together.

What will Schools Do? We know that some schools will continue to wait for EYFS Profile 2012 before recording any assessments of their Foundation Stage children at all; some will continue to use the Bright Profile for now and then switch to the 2012 Profile before the end of the year; and some will use the Bright Profile to record progress all the way through this year but make a separate, manual submission using the 2012 Profile at the end of the year as well.

Could it be Worse? It would have been useful to have the profile for the end of this year decided upon before the start of this year, so that assessments could be made to measure children’s progress through this year. But if you seek sympathy from anyone in Wales, where a new Early Years assessment framework was introduced, used, modified and then withdrawn in the space of a year, you might not get much!

Guest post by Nicola Porter, Founder of Education Reporter and former editor of TES Cymru:

Castle Park Primary in Caldicot, Monmouthshire, prides itself as being a school fit for the 21^st century. Already a dedicated Forest School with fantastic outdoor learning opportunities for pupils, a new £1 million Learning Plaza was officially opened last month - an open plan classroom for 60 pupils in different year groups to work side by side in light and airy conditions. The Plaza is the first of its kind in Monmouthshire and provides a modern alternative to traditional desk based learning.

Jessica Morden MP opens the Learning Plaza

But besides offering state-of-the-art facilities, the primary is also leading the way in another area of school improvement high on the Welsh Government agenda since devolution – the use of sophisticated data in raising standards.

At the heart of Castle Park’s objectives to improve results via data analysis is the Incerts Assessment System. In a bold move after a trial run by Monmouthshire County Council last year, every one of the local authority’s primary school’s teachers now uses the teacher-friendly system to keep track of pupils’ progress. But it was headteacher Rob Wilshire who started the ball rolling when he used his own initiative to introduce the Incerts Assessment System to the school three years ago. He says it was a “gamble” that’s paid off and teacher assessment could be patchy before Incerts arrived.

Mr Wilshire has made a further ground-breaking move this term by appointing Mostyn Jones – a Reception teacher - into a new post with a paid responsibility for raising standards. Central to Mr Jones’ role is analysing widely available data on pupils’ progress with a focus on data supplied in-house by teaching staff on the Incerts’ system. The 34-year-old teacher is taking a MA in Learning and Management to improve his understanding of good pedagogical practice in teaching and learning – including the effective use of data.

He says the assessment system is helping the school and its teachers to identify strengths and weaknesses in individual pupils and between classes. Easy to use, with colourful graphs and tables, he also says the system is easily understood by teaching staff.

The Incerts Assessment System works by teachers reliably inputting judgments on pupils’ progress into boxes on a progression chart for each core subject.  The system “flashes red” if a pupil is having difficulties in any area of English, maths or science. For example, in writing a system could show a child to be excellent at spelling and grammar but to have a relatively limited vocabulary. Once problem areas are identified in pupils extra support is provided quickly and before it’s too late.

Working in close collaboration with John Healy, Monmouthshire’s Acting Principle School Improvement Officer, Incerts has been rolled out cross-county:  "Incerts is helping to transform teaching and learning in Monmouthshire. The authority now has a greater confidence in how its schools record pupil progress. Its (Incerts) implementation has been dynamic and it is now the bedrock for driving performance improvement at school level.

“The support for schools from the organisation Incerts itself has been substantial. They have provided extensive training and telephone call support and schools have had little difficulty in integrating the software,” says Mr Healy.

According to the former head, other bonuses of the system are being able to access it online at home, reducing workload, identifying pupils’ next steps for learning, informing target setting and helping to make the transition between classes and key stages more effective.

The Incerts Assessment System is based on the Welsh National curriculum and the seven areas of learning within the play-led Foundation Phase. 

With raising standards a Welsh Government’s priority, the Incerts system is seen a powerful ally in the race to tackle a long tail of underachievement in education that has been well-documented since devolution in Wales.

Assessment – where judgments are made on children’s progress by individual class teachers – has come under fire for not being consistent enough and having too many moderation issues since SATS tests at ages seven, 11 and 14 were scrapped last decade.

Head Rob Wilshire said that Incerts meant information on individual children’s progress could be drip fed through the school. With so much externally arrived at data for schools to digest – including the Welsh Government, local authority and Fischer Family Trust – he says the system provides an opportunity for internal analysis and comparisons at teachers’ fingertips. Mr Wilshire said he hadn’t been aware of the benefits of Incerts for writing end of year reports when he introduced it: “It’s taken the laborious part out of writing reports in the old-fashioned way and saving teachers’ hours.”

One in three Welsh primaries is presently signed up to the Incerts Assessment System - including every school in Monmouthshire. In a survey, almost three-quarters of schools who answered said Incerts had changed the way schools used or shared assessment. 

The Foundation Phase CDAP is used to provide a baseline assessment of every child in Wales on entry to the Foundation Phase. Children are observed, and their behaviour is compared with descriptions and examples. There are (usually) three different descriptions to consider at each developmental "Step" (1a, 1b, 1c at Step 1; 2a, 2b, 2c at Step 2; etc.) within each of six "Areas". However, the judgement of the practitioner in that Area is summarised into a single number, that of the Step that best describes the child's behaviour, and only these six numbers are collected and transfered to DCELLS.

If children, settings and Local Authorities across Wales are going to be compared on the basis of this data, then the rules or guidance given for arriving at a Step from a record of which Descriptions of Behaviour have been observed are significant. The FPCDAP book, distributed to schools and dated May 2011, gives this example to illustrate how the best-fit decision might be made. It shows how Step 3 could be attained even though Description 3c was not met: presumably the best-fit decision took 4a into account.

In contrast, an AWFPA meeting in April 2011 at which 20 of the 22 Authorities in Wales were represented discussed the "paramount importance" of consistency across Wales in applying best-fit. They agreed to advise all settings and schools, via their Training Officers, to award a Step only if all the Descriptions at that Step were met (which would mean awarding Step 2 rather than Step 3 if they'd looked at the example above). This rule for understanding best-fit, or arguably for eliminating it, is certainly simple enough to have the desired effect. It was subsequently agreed by DCELLS, relayed to every Authority and adhered to ever since.

This morning we have updated Incerts CDAP, our online system for recording and tracking children's progress through these Steps, to reflect the current view of DCELLS. It's not been acknowledged that the FPCDAP book still conflicts with this advice, or that a few Authorities have not fallen into line with the rest, but as far as we can ascertain up to today this is the way that most children's Steps will be arrived at.

We would like one approach, whichever it is, to be communicated and consistently applied across the country. Otherwise, the data that everyone is working so hard to collect won't be meaningful.

Along with the Heads of most Primary and Infant Schools in England, we await Dame Tickell's report into the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum with bated breath. By the time any new EYFS Profile is ready for use, though, we could all be dizzy from asphyxia: so in the meantime, how can we measure a pupil's progress through their Reception year?

Admittedly I'm no expert in child development, but I do know more than is healthy about measurement and data. I will argue that any meaningful method of measuring progress in some area of learning must have:

1. A baseline or on-entry score expressed on the same scale as the assessments made after that
2. A measurement scale whose steps are small enough to see even slow progress in as little as a term
3. Widely-supported agreement on the amount of progress that should be expected on that scale

Only a method like this can be used formatively, e.g. for spotting children who are "stuck" in some area of their learning. If you're unconvinced, ask yourself how you'd understand a child's progress in Language for Communication if given an FSP score like 5, 6, or 7 and a baseline of "40 months"; or how you'd distinguish among the children in a Reception class when almost all of them made "3 points" in Physical Development?

If you're using Incerts for recording in Reception/FS2 then you've cleverly dodged these problems. Incerts expresses baselines (recorded at the end of Nursery or the beginning of Reception) on the same 0-9 scale it uses for assessment through Reception; and it combines the small steps you can record in each area and subject (using our "beginning"/"developing"/"able" boxes in the standard profile or the extra "dotted" boxes in the extended Bright Profile) into scores like 5.8, 5.9, 6.0, etc. rather than just "6 points". There's broad-ish agreement that the difference between the scores at the end and the beginning of Reception should be 3 points in each area, and Incerts might tell you that one pupil's progress was 2.9, another's was 3.1, etc.

Recently, we've designed some charts that show the progress of the children in a Reception class rather nicely, comparing each child's score with an on-entry score and drawing a coloured bar that makes its way towards a "bulls eye" target and turns green when it gets there. Here's the top-left corner of one:

Schools in England can see charts like this when they output to Excel from the Class View page with a Reception/FS2 class selected. For the moment, the End of FS2 Target values must be typed into the column manually before the coloured bars will appear, but in the next version we could create these targets automatically with a formula (adding 3.0 to the On-Entry Score) or allow them to be uploaded into Incerts at the start of the year (like the Fischer Family Trust targets for year 6).

I haven't seen a method or tool I like better than this yet—specifically for showing progress through Reception. If your school has been recording Foundation Stage data in Incerts this year, and you recorded last July or September/October to give a baseline, do try out these charts and share your thoughts with us.