When I started my teaching career, we wrote reports using carbon copy paper sheets: the “good” bit went home, the illegible bit stayed in school.

If you taught in a secondary school and had lots of classes, you could end up writing up to 360 reports.

This was not a good thing for teachers like me who cannot write even a few words without making errors or spelling mistakes. By the time that I had corrected all the mistakes, smudges and other problems with them, I would have written about 900 reports and lost lots of sleep in the process.  

Report-writing problems

Even though the way we do reports may have changed, they are often still a source of frustration. Twitter feeds are full of people engaged in extensive report writing - or posting pictures of kittens instead of report writing. On behalf of every weary teacher writing their summer reports, is it is time for us to rethink how we feedback on a student’s year?

What is it that parents really want to know about their child in school? Is their child making progress? Do they do their homework? Do they behave in class? Are they happy?

Do we really need an end-of-year report to find out about how children are doing?

Here are four other ways of reviewing a student’s year.

1. Students write the reports for us

How about students writing their own reports? While they do not have all the theoretical knowledge of teaching and learning or the curriculum, they do know themselves and what they can and cannot do. I realise that this method may be a little challenging for foundation students or reluctant writers, but I can definitely see the merits. Independent learning improves, metacognition develops and teachers can have an end-of-term rest while their students do all the work.

2. We vlog it instead

We are in a media-rich age; teachers could vlog about their classes. Set up a camera, work your way through your class list, talk about what you love about the student or what you don’t. You can talk about the moments when they are happy, show some of their best work and where they go wrong. There is plenty of software out there to encrypt and release the video to only the people you want to see it. You will have some highly personalised feedback that can be referred to any time they want. 

3. Voice-to-text software

Some on Twitter have mentioned using voice-to-text software, so they can “write” reports while cleaning the house or feeding the dog if they want to. This software is getting ever cheaper, but it is also plagued with a few problems, as some tweeters discovered. The extensive proofreading required may negate the benefits of not having to sit and type out the words yourself.

4. Send regular texts home

Finally, what about sending more regular texts home instead? Schools now use texts for attendance, and for notices. In addition, my own online activity tells me there are plenty of teachers who are never far from their phones. Texting your comments could take no more than a few seconds for each student. It could put an end to the tension, the rewrites and typos. The most satisfying part of this could be when the year hasn’t gone so well, and all attempts to engage the most reluctant of learners have failed. You also have plenty of emojis or gifs to sum up without words exactly how you feel.

Ruth Golding is a head of school at Tor Bridge High, Plymouth. She tweets @LearnerLedLdr