The impact of ART & AMT assessments in St George's School

We asked Ann Fitzgerald, Assessments Officer & Learning Support Manager at St George’s School, Harpenden Academy about the impact of Access Reading Tests (ART) and Access Mathematics Tests (AMT) on teachers and learners in her school.This is what she said: 

"At St George’s School, we’ve found the ART and AMT interactive assessments to be useful tools, particularly for screening students in Year 9. We also use the paper versions for individual in-year entries and for interventions. Based on our experience, I would recommend both ART and AMT tests to other schools. 

Using ART and AMT tests to screen Year 9 has been very helpful. This gives us a consistent assessment point and useful information between the key stages. It helps address any concerns from parents, too, We don’t share detailed results with students or parents, but we do communicate whether students’ reading and maths test results are in line with expectations for their age.  

We use the assessments to support access arrangements as part of our assessor evidence. The standardised scores, reading and maths ages are helpful indicators. If a student is performing significantly below age expectations, then we investigate further using additional assessments. 

The online versions of the tests are very straightforward to use and saves time on marking. This year we ran the online assessments in our computer suites during timetabled computing lessons and distribute the links via Google Classroom. While the process is generally smooth, monitoring can be more difficult than in the school hall where we would do the paper tests and where students would be sat further apart from each other. The ease of the online tests providing results immediately, though, probably outweighs this concern and we are aware we’ll have to monitor some students carefully. 

The Boost Insights and Admin Hub are easy to navigate, and syncing with SIMS was straightforward. Adding any additional students manually was also easy, as was allocating extra time within the online test time, for those who need it. We haven’t needed to contact Hachette’s digital support but we did use the online Help pages for the step by step guide to download the reports into Excel. 

ART and AMT are amongst my favourite tests for effectiveness and if budget allows, I will be considering extending the screening to more year groups."