The Scottish Executive plans to review school arrangements for reporting pupils’ progress to their parents. The aim is to make the 5-14 system clearer for parents so that they can understand their children’s performance better. The review could lead to a national reporting format that benefits teachers as well as parents, says an Executive source.

“Streamlining existing arrangements and providing appropriate and focused support for teachers, in response to their feedback on the initiatives already in place, should help to reduce teachers’ workload, not increase it.”

The problem for many parents and teachers seems to lie mainly in “wordy” primary reports rather than in secondary ones, which offer shorter written comments and more tick boxes. These are less time-consuming to produce and easier to follow.

Many primary teachers would prefer to adopt or adapt secondary report models and some local authorities, such as Aberdeen City Council, are already preparing to pilot a format in primaries which offers fewer written comments.

Primary teachers in particular complain about the time it takes to compile and produce pupils’ reports - two hours per report, estimates one teacher - and their efficacy. They feel the present format tends more towards obscurity than clarity, that it encourages jargon rather than direct communication with parents, that there can be unnecessary detail and that parents often don’t understand what is being said.

Many parents, however, seem either to be generally satisfied or only mildly dissatisfied with the present reporting arrangements. Some talk of the need for an improved design. One father says he was “surprised” by the “incredible detail” in his daughter’s P1 report and wondered if it was really necessary at that stage of her education.

All value face-to-face meetings with teachers, viewing them as equally important or more important than the written reports. Many feel problems are best addressed, if not identified, through talking directly to the teacher and they welcome the average two parents’ nights per session that most primaries schedule. One mother says: “If it was just the report you were depending on, you wouldn’t get a clear view at all.”

Parental reply slips are popular and most agreed that a comment slip for the pupil’s response would be a good idea.

Reports vary from school to school and from teacher to teacher in the length and depth of the comments they feature. Most parents seem to accept this as inevitable but some criticise teachers for being “sometimes a bit jargony and jaded; you can tell they’ve said the same things on other reports”. One P7 parent says: “You feel you’re reading anybody’s report. It’s not personalised enough and doesn’t tell you enough about how your child learns and what specific difficuties he’s having.”

A practical suggestion from some parents was that computer-generated report books would overcome problems in reading teachers’ handwriting.

A few of the parents say they would like to know what position their child was in the class, though others are vehemently against this for being “divisive” and “competitive in the wrong way”, bringing added and undesirable pressure to bear on both children and their parents.

A father says: “I don’t want to pressure my daughter to be first or second in the class, though a lot of parents might like that. It creates expectations which in turn create more pressure.”

A mother of a P4 girl and P7 boy says: “Reports are careful not to compare with other children and I can understand that. I don’t want my children in competition with others. I’m not interested in their positions in class as long as they are reaching the appropriate levels.”

A P4 pupil’s father suggests an alternative, saying he would like to know how his daughter performs “against a local and national average”.

Accomodating report writing within the 35-hour week proposed by the McCrone report will be physically impossible as they stand, most primary teachers agree. It will necessitate simplifying the process for them while achieving clarity for parents.

The Scottish Executive spokesperson says: “The proposed changes should not present a workload difficulty. Teachers currently carry out these duties. The changes can be accomodated within the teacher working week and by the introduction of additional support staff to carry out administrative tasks, outlined in the agreement A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century.”