One of the central objectives of Forest Hill School is to ensure that students make progress in all of their subjects. This applies to all students, ranging from the extremely able student who needs to be pushed to reach even higher standards, to the students with the most challenging learning difficulties who struggle to access the curriculum.

Formal Feedback

To ensure progress is achieved it is crucial that the relationship and communication between student, school and parents/carers is very strong.  Therefore we, as a school, are committed to formally providing detailed and robust information about our students three times a year.  This takes the form of:

1. Autumn Progress Report and Academic Review Day
2. Spring Progress Report and Parents’ Evening
3. Summer Term Certificate of Progress  

Feedback to students is one of the most important ways to ensure they are making good progress in their subjects and know how to improve and raise their attainment. Therefore, at Forest Hill we have developed a comprehensive system of feeding back to parents using GCSE 1–9 grades, attitudinal data and contact with teachers.

The reason for using the established GCSE 1–9 scale from Year 7 onwards is so that parents can see the grade a student is working at in any subject at any time. It also means that we can assess a student in the same way from Years 7 to 11 and we can all monitor his progress effectively.

Setting targets

We use a renowned target setting piece of software from the Fischer Family Trust organisation which allows us to use a student’s KS2 scores, his date of birth, gender and other factors to set him aspirational targets for each of his subjects. 

We set the end of Year 11 target first and then work back from there in each of his subjects.  These targets are designed to be aspirational and allow him to get the best possible grades in each subject.