Report week in the staffroom
At the end of each month, every long-stay student needs a progress report for their agent, their parents or their sponsor. Teachers are given a Word template and a list of names. They look up attendance in the register, find the last test score in their marking folder, check the student's level, and write a paragraph. Some write a line, some write a page.
The office then turns them into PDFs, finds the right email address for each agent, and sends them. A week later an agent asks for a report on a student who has had three teachers this month, and no one wrote it.
Why reports eat teaching time
- The facts in a report are scattered: register, tests, level history, notes.
- Teachers look up the same information the office already has.
- Students who moved class fall between two teachers.
- Each agent wants a slightly different format or schedule.
- Sending reports is a manual job for the office.
Most of a report is data the school already holds. Only the comment needs the teacher.
The cost of doing it by hand
Teacher time on reports is time not spent planning lessons. Reports that arrive late, or not at all, make agents wonder what else is being missed. Inconsistent reports make it hard for parents to compare one month to the next. And with a comment written in a hurry, the one part that needs a teacher's judgement is the part that suffers.
The progress reports we build
- At a date you set, a report is drafted for every student who needs one, using attendance from the register, level history, placement and progress test scores, and course dates.
- The teacher who knows the student best, by default whoever taught them most that month, gets their drafts in a queue.
- They add or edit a short comment. If you want, a first draft of the comment is suggested from their marking notes using an AI model such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude, which the teacher always reviews and rewrites as they see fit.
- The director of studies can scan reports and approve them in batches.
- Approved reports are produced as PDFs in your design and sent to the agent, parent or sponsor on the student's record, in the format each agent prefers.
- Every report is kept on the student's record, so the next report, and the end of course certificate, can refer back to it.
| Report section | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Attendance | Digital register |
| Current level and changes | Level history |
| Test scores | Placement and progress tests |
| Teacher comment | Written or edited by the teacher |
| Recipient | Agent, parent or sponsor on the booking |
Report week, shortened
Teachers spend their report time on the comment, which is what agents and parents actually read. The office stops copying and pasting. Students who moved class get a report from the teacher who knows them best. Reports go out on the same day each month, in a format agents recognise, and nothing is missed because a student changed class.
Agents notice the difference quickly. A report that arrives on the same day every month, with attendance and level shown the same way each time, is something their own staff can forward to parents without rewriting. When a parent asks a follow-up question, the office can open the report history and see the trend over the whole stay rather than one month on its own.
Do reports look like this at your school?
- Teachers write progress reports from a blank template.
- Attendance and test scores are looked up by hand.
- Reports go out late or get missed.
- Students who changed class fall between teachers.
- The office emails each report one by one.