Curriculum for Wales Assessment Processes and Procedures

Personalised Assessments

Understanding the Personalised Assessment progress reports

Your child will be taking short, personalised assessments for Numerical Reasoning, Procedural Numeracy and Reading in June.

What is being assessed in the personalised assessments?

Numerical reasoning assessments provide information on how well your child can use and apply what they know in order to solve numerical problems.
Procedural Numeracy focuses on numerical facts and procedures – the numerical ‘tools’ that are needed to apply numeracy within a range of contexts.
Reading personalised assessments provide information on how well a child understands a text and whether they are able to make judgements about what they are reading.

How do the assessments work?

The questions the children given are chosen from a large question bank designed for learners between Year 2 and Year 9. The class teacher can set each learner’s first question based on how they are currently working in class. For example, if your child is working within Year 3 expectations, they will start within a question suitable for a year 3 learner. If your child is progressing at a slower rate the class teacher can set the first question to a year group lower than your child’s current year group. Each question is selected based on the child’s previous answer. If the child answer’s the question correctly the next question may be slightly harder than the previous. Had the child answered the question incorrectly the next question may be slightly easier than the last. This means all pupils will undertake an assessment which is completely unique to them.

What does the report tell me?

The first section of the report shows your child’s progress in the personalised assessments. The assessments taken by your child are shown on the graph. Your child may have taken more than one assessment a year so the graph will either have one or two assessments shown for each school year. Using the information from their assessments, the graph shows where your child is in comparison to children in their year group across Wales. You will be able to see your child’s progress from one year to the next.

The second section of the report gives your child’s age-standardised score for their most recent assessment. This shows how your child has done compared with other children in Wales who were born in the same year and month.

The score range is 70–130 and the average is 100. In a few cases, if a child has a very high age-standardised score it may be shown as ‘more than 130’ (130+), and a child whose skills are developing more slowly may have a score shown as ‘less than 70’ (<70). About 2.5 per cent of learners will have a score shown as less than 70, and about 2.5 per cent of learners will have a score shown as more than 130.

If you require any help in understanding your child’s results, please do not hesitate to speak to your child’s class teacher or Mrs O’Sullivan (Assessment Co-ordinator).