Penny Lewis: Children's reports leave me baffled

I'VE just received my daughter's and my son's school reports. My daughter Lily is ten, my son John is 11. The reports are "new style", produced to comply with the Curriculum for Excellence.

They came with a covering letter from the head teacher suggesting that I might find the new report "more reader friendly". The sentence that follows reads: "The work of your child has not been levelled, but what has been covered this year through Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes has been matched appropriately for each stage." I am baffled - already I am struggling to understand what the school is trying to say.

I don't know what "levelled" means. I presume it refers to what we oldies call "marks". I don't know what the school means by "Experiences and Outcomes", but I am reassured to know that, whatever they are, they are "appropriate" to each stage (which I presume is a year, or perhaps a group of years). I work in a university, so I'm not ignorant of the charms of educational jargon - "outcomes" are everywhere - but are they appropriate in the school report of a ten-year-old? Is nowhere free from this creeping managerialism?

Some educationalists, perhaps those that have embraced the new Curriculum for Excellence, no doubt feel there is something liberating about this new education system that embraces the strengths and weaknesses of the whole child rather than relying on old-fashioned didacticism. But even if you were to accept the flawed logic of the new pedagogues, by any sensible measurement the language used in these reports is anything but accessible. The texts jump between Janet and John banality to bureaucrats' jargonese.

The main content of the report is not to tell me what my daughter has achieved and where her weaknesses are, but to describe to me what she has enjoyed studying and what school trips she has been on. Given that we had already discussed this kind of feedback in the normal run of family life, there was very little in the report that was of any use to me or my children.

All subjects other than English (sorry "languages") and maths have been lumped together in the category "Health and wellbeing".

Why, I wonder, is health given a capital letter but wellbeing treated as lower case? My daughter's diet and the school and local council's prejudices on the issue of health have apparently become more important than sport - or geography, science or history.

In the middle of my daughter's report I am told that she works "confidently with the four processes".I ask her what the four processes might be: she has no idea. I ask my son, who is a couple of years older. "Oh yes," he says. "The four processes, that's 'confident learner', successful something and something, something else". I'm not sure if that's what the processes are.

He encourages me to look it up on the internet, but I worry that I may be wasting valuable time. My son, who is about to go to high school and has something close to a photographic memory, is aware that there are four mantras, but has failed to internalise them.

A couple of weeks ago he was asked to write a "reflective piece" for homework. At the summer concert his peers told the audience about the "learning journey" they had travelled in preparation for the show. From an early age our children are being asked to constantly audit their learning. There is a real danger that the recording of the tasks and skills involved in schoolwork (something that used to be the concern of teachers only) has become more important than what they learn. "Everything is so bloody reflective, I'm blinded," remarked my husband.

I asked my son what a "reflective piece" might be. He didn't know: "Something shiny?" You may laugh, but this is a serious issue - the current fad for encouraging students as young as ten to record their learning journey will suck all of the joy and passion out of education for staff and pupils.

If a report is to be more reader-friendly, surely it must be more intelligible and personal. I can still remember the comments on some of my old school reports: "Penny has used her ability to the full," wrote my music teacher more than 30 years ago. She elaborated that although I had little natural musical talent I had tried really hard.

I can't imagine such personal, if slightly eccentric, language or judgment appearing in today's anodyne reports. Thanks to my teacher's rather eccentric turn of phrase, both she and the sentiment (you should try very hard even if you find a subject difficult) have stuck with me for life. Somehow, I can't imagine that the judgment from my son's (otherwise excellent) Newly Qualified Teacher that his "writing is always of a standard that meets all of the criteria set" will have the same enduring impact.

I can't help but note the difference between my son's reaction to his report and to his recent Grade 1 piano exam. The grading felt like a hangover from another time; an aura of rigorous assessment filled the waiting room. The piano examiner was apparently "posh and scary". She gave no feedback (or encouragement) during the exam, and the result (pass or fail) is to arrive in the post. What was astounding was the impact of this ten-minute exam on my son - he really relished the judgment.When he had finished, it was as if I could see him growing before my eyes.

Looking past the managerial lingo that frames my children's reports, forgetting for a moment the blended, active and reflective learning, I try to get a grip on my children's performance. In the last few years I have struggled with the contorted assessment tables in which we are told our child is working at such and such a level, but at least they provided something approximating a mark. In the new reports, marks and levels have been abolished altogether.

As I turned to the final pages of my daughter's report, my heart skipped a beat: through the paper I could see a table with numbers. Was it possible that she had grades? No. Two whole sheets of paper were devoted to an attendance table. Why the education authority feels it is necessary to tell the parents of primary children when their children missed school was not explained - perhaps they were confusing the needs of the authority with information that might be useful to parents. The table sits unannounced at the back of the report like a poor production report from an old factory in the former Soviet Union.

The irony is, for all the rhetoric about pupils controlling their own learning and working according to their own strengths, these reports actually disempower pupils and parents because they don't provide any real judgments about the student's performance. I look forward to a day when teachers can again write honest reports that we can read and understand.

If the new-style reports are anything to go by, the Curriculum for Excellence is anything but excellent - it certainly doesn't deserve all of the capital letters that are lavished on it. The new reports are a clear expression of an education system detached from the joy of teaching and suffocated by managerial policy initiatives.

• Penny Lewis is a working mother based in Dundee

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