It’s Year 11 report writing time. Not only have to write reports for all the Year 11 classes I teach, but as a year 11 form tutor I also have to write reports for all my tutor group. I teach four groups of students totally about 60 kids, and then a form group of 22. So that’s 82 reports I have to write. As does every other year 11 teacher in the school.

Most students do about ten subjects, and we require a report and a copy of the report. Each student will receive 20 sheets of A5 paper, however giving those to the kids would be a mess so I am given them instead.

With the reports for each of the students in my tutor group I have to do the following

• Check the name and tutor group for mistakes
• Check the report isn’t actually missing
• Look for obvious mistakes “John is making good progress in Maths, with hard work she will do well” (syntax errors)
• Look for less obvious mistakes “John is making good progress in Maths, he is predicted a C but is only working at a B” (logic errors)
• Put them all in order, alphabetically and split the copies off into separate piles
• Scan through all the report again and tally up the grades and write a short summary

And that is just a giant mess and what we teachers call an “admin task”. They’re short, brainless and fairly simple tasks to do, but having to do them all throughly and correctly 22 times can take hours. Really, boredom sets in after the third one.

So what I did was spend an hour with my form and get them to do it for me. Each student was programmed to do the listed tasks above and then I just went around and made sure they were doing it correctly.

I even got most of them to write me some targets for improvement so that I don’t have to read the reports too carefully. I will still need to read through each report to make sure there are no pages missing, but I’ll only need to read each report once and can then put it in a pile in alphabetical order. Last year, without student help, I had to sort and find reports more than twice.

For the final killer piece of time saving, I took the data off the summary sheets and typed it into a class list in Microsoft Excel, and then tomorrow I will mail-merge this onto the report templates. The end result will be 22 reports that just need a few personalised comments adding.

Work smarter, not harder