Pupil Progress

Pupil Progress and Assessment

Resilience, not reliance

At Ganton School, we believe that every pupil can make meaningful progress. Our pupils have a wide range of learning, communication, sensory, physical and social and emotional needs, so progress will not look the same for every learner.

Our approach is based on each pupil’s individual starting point rather than chronological age alone. Assessment helps us understand what pupils already know and can do, identify barriers to learning and plan the most appropriate next steps.

Resilience by Design

Our ambition is to develop pupils’ knowledge, communication, skills and independence so that they are increasingly able to participate in their learning, their community and their future.

Our Resilience by Design approach brings together three complementary assessment and progression frameworks:

Staged Curriculum: identifies progress in curriculum knowledge and skills through carefully sequenced developmental stages.

Fundamentals of Learning: identifies development in communication and interaction, cognition and learning, social and emotional development, and sensory and physical development.

Resilience Framework: considers the executive functioning skills pupils need to manage and apply their learning, including working memory, attention, organisation, emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility.

What does progress look like?

Meaningful progress is about more than moving to the next assessment level.

For a Ganton pupil, progress might mean acquiring new curriculum knowledge, communicating more independently, remembering and applying something previously learned, sustaining engagement, managing a transition, developing greater independence or using a skill successfully in a new situation.

Our curriculum therefore allows pupils the time they need to practise, repeat and apply learning so that knowledge and skills become secure.

For pupils working below subject-specific learning, we use the Engagement Model to recognise progress through Exploration, Realisation, Anticipation, Persistence and Initiation.

Teachers continually use assessment to understand progress and determine what needs to happen next:

Understand the learner → identify priorities → teach → observe impact → review → identify the next step

Assessment information is considered alongside teachers’ knowledge of the pupil and their wider development. Good progress is never judged by data alone.

Small steps. High expectations. Meaningful progress.

For some Ganton pupils, what appears to be a small step can represent an enormous achievement. Our role is to recognise those achievements while maintaining high expectations and ensuring that every pupil’s next steps are ambitious, developmentally appropriate and meaningful for their future.