The end-of-year school report, prized and feared by children and parents alike, is no longer quite what it seems.



Once a personal document, handwritten in ink with individual comments, today your child’s report is more likely to have been generated by software.

As parents around the country this week pore over their child’s record of achievement for the year, for many there is disappointment at the formulaic nature of much of the comment – and some embarrassing mistakes.

One mother’s nine-year-old daughter opened her report to find that her teacher had got her gender wrong on three separate occasions. “It was a good report, and it understood my child,” she said.



“But it was undermined by the mistakes, and I felt sad for my child that she would see this and know that at that moment the teacher was not thinking of her.

“It made us feel really let down that the school does not appear to be giving it as much care and thought as my daughter deserves.”

Most teachers have a comment bank ... You pick one that sounds about right, whip it out and plonk it in Primary school teacher

Another mother said: “Even when I point out the good things in my son’s report, he shrugs it off and says: ‘It’s all cut and paste anyway. They said exactly the same thing about my friends.’”

One Mumsnet contributor wrote this week that her two daughters, in years two and four, brought their reports home only to find that the younger girl’s comments were identical to those of her older sister two years earlier.

Another wrote: “[My son’s] report said ‘Well done Thomas’ at the end of one paragraph. His name’s not anywhere near being Thomas.”

Ben Goodings (not his real name) has been a primary school teacher for eight years and is happy to shed light on his own report-writing process, which he says is typical. He doesn’t rely on software but uses plenty of cut and paste.

“I’ve never met a single teacher who actually writes a report for a child without having at least several passages that have been cut and pasted from others,” he said.



“Most teachers will have a comment bank they have accrued over the years. I’ve got a bank of literary comments, maths comments and general comments. You can pick one that sounds about right, whip it out and plonk it in.



“This year I think I wrote five comments from the heart – for various reasons, either they were children of exceptional ability or they were children about whom there are serious concerns.

“Otherwise I tend to go through each child and look for a previous child I’ve taught of a similar ability or disposition and I’ve just tweaked it to adjust names or gender. I hate the fact that I have to do it that way, but no one really has the time any more.

“I’m a parent. When I get my child’s report through from school, I shall take half of it with a pinch of salt.”

Alex Ogg, who until recently worked as an English teacher in a number of secondary schools, despaired of the software-generated reports he was forced to write. He has used the Sims report writing program, which is one of a number available on the market.

It was introduced as an attempt to ease teacher workload, but according to Ogg it often frustrated as none of the options would quite capture what he wanted to say about a child and the end product was never satisfactory.



“You can tell from the robotic script, the human voice is lost, but I also found it a very time-consuming and ultimately fruitless task.



“I find it dishonest. Parents are reading this and think these are the teacher’s thoughts. Instead it’s a process of box-ticking on a computer program, in order to select the most suitable comment,” said Ogg.

“I’ve seen teachers in the staff room go through and do reports for an entire class in an hour. It’s a more important document than that.”

He added that he had seen the same weaknesses in his own children’s reports. “There was one in which my son was referred to throughout as Imran, which is not his name.

“Elsewhere he was given 1 – the highest possible mark – for behaviour, then the teacher must have pressed the wrong button because there was a comment saying he was constantly causing disruption.

“Nobody was even proofreading these things and it meant that you couldn’t trust the validity of any of the information.



“I just ignore reports from my own children’s schools because I know what they are doing. I wait till parents’ evening.



“I’m usually a staunch supporter of teachers and schools, but we’ve got to try and be professional here.”



Anne Lyons, the headteacher of St John Fisher Catholic primary school in Pinner, north-west London, says her school has resisted going down the route of software-generated reports because the product tends to be “too generic”.



She and her deputy proofread every report to ensure there are no errors, and each one is expected to give parents a real sense of their child and their progress throughout the year.

“It’s a child’s report. It’s really important to that child and their parents. I would be very upset if a parent did not recognise a child from what a teacher writes.”

A spokesman for the National Association for Head Teachers said: “At the end of the school year, parents need and deserve a school report that accurately reflects the kind of year that their children have had.

“Headteachers invest a lot of time and effort into making sure this happens. Technology can help that process but it should never get in the way of a truly personal report for each and every child in the school.”

