Reporting to Parents

You'll notice the format of your child's report has changed significantly since 2025. The Ministry of Education has directed schools to use a series of common features on all school reports by 2027.

 

Understanding the Changes:

The key change is how we report your child’s progress and achievement. In the past, we’ve used language such as “Working towards,” “At,” and “Above” to indicate your child’s achievement. We’ve compared where they are to where they should be for this point in the school year.

The new reports use Progress Descriptors. These five descriptors indicate where your child’s learning is at compared to the expectations for the end of the year. The important thing to understand is that we use these same criteria in the middle of the year too. Each of the three areas of Reading, Writing and Mathematics uses these same descriptors.

 

 

The top of each of the learning areas has the “Overall Achievement” in the top right, and the comment begins with one of two sentences:

• (Child’s Name) is on track to meet expectations
• (Child’s Name) is not yet on track to meet expectations

 

At the end of the year, this phrasing changes to:

• (Child’s Name) has met expectations
• (Child’s Name) has not met expectations

 

 

In Reading and Writing, your child’s teacher has further broken this information down into the skills that go into these areas. The reports show “Not Yet Taught” for all of the areas of Mathematics, which is not correct. A better phrase would be “Not completely taught yet.”

The Mathematics “strands” are taught through a series of smaller topics, which are often not taught together. For example, Measurement may be taught as a block of three weeks covering length, another block of three weeks around measuring angles, and a further block of three weeks around telling time. Using this example, teachers may not be able to make a judgement on Measurement if only one of these units of work has been taught so far. Your child's end of year report will show this full level of detail.

 

Parent Portal:

The Ministry of Education has put together a comprehensive "Parent Portal." This contains information about the content that we teach at each year level, as well as some ways that you can help support your child's learning at home. In particular, each Year level has a page about what books your child may be coming home with and how to help them develop their reading. There is a video at the top of the website to let you know how to best navigate it.

Parent Portal