23rd December 2015 - Inspections & Assessments for Christmas

Thought for the day :" A plateau is the highest form of flattery "

For my teacher friends...

Due to the Department for Education’s ongoing need for rigorous and relentless change, this year yuletide celebrations will depart from the usual round of festive relaxation and family enjoyment.
As of today, Tuesday 22nd December, the requirements for Christmas are listed below. Please note that these requirements can – and will – change frequently and incomprehensibly.

1. A Christmas can no longer be deemed “satisfactory”. All Christmases will be observed for 45 minutes after which they will be judged outstanding, good or requiring improvement.

2. For a Christmas to be judged as outstanding, the following criteria must be met:

• The objective of the day must be clearly displayed on all gifts, mince pies and cracker jokes. Before any present opening can occur, all family members must write down the objective and what they already know about it.

• An example objective might be, “be nice to each other”. This will need differentiating so that those members of the family who have issues with “being nice” have more achievable goals and those who find it easy are given a more challenging target. 

 By the end of Christmas:

•   All family members will have been spent at least 10 minutes “being nice” to each other.

• Most family members will have “been nice” during all festive meals.

• Some family members will have ”been nice” for three consecutive hours.

Extension objective: to remember to buy siblings a present.

By the end of festivities, progress against the objective must be measured.

• This can be achieved via a written assessment, individual interviews or deep questioning; questions should be pre-planned and scaled according to difficulty.

• Family members may opt for peer assessment but only if this does not risk inducing behaviour that is not in keeping with the day’s objective.

By New Year’s Eve, all Christmas marking and assessment must be responded to in writing.

• This can be in the form of thank you letters but may be a single written comment. For example, “You are right, I should not have eaten my sister’s giant gobstopper just before lunch. Next year I will hide it until Boxing Day.”

Special attention should be paid to the achievement of family members in the following group: those receiving free school meals; looked-after children; forces children.

• If a child who is in receipt of free school meals and one who is not are both failing to meet the Christmas objective (being nice, in case you forgot), the child in receipt of free school meals should be given some additional “intervention time”, while the other one gets on with being horrid.

Opportunities must be presented for numeracy challenges.

• For example, if Mum has one glass of wine an hour and the turkey needs to cook for three hours, how many people will be needed to hold Mum up as she makes the gravy?

Opportunities must be presented to make progress against literacy too.

• For example, if you focus on speech marks it might be a good idea to encourage all family members to make a “speech mark” gesture with their fingers every time they talk. 
• An alternative gesture could be selected for those who prefer to grunt, although grunting may not fit in with the Christmas objective of being nice.

Christmases that fail to meet the required standard will be placed in “Xmas Measures”.

• They will (within six months or so) be allocated a super santa to guide them into becoming a new type of Christmas: an “Xmas”. Smiling throughout this process will be discouraged.

• Should the demoted Christmas refuse to become an “Xmas” or work alongside their allocated successful super santa, Christmas will be disbanded and we will all have to wait another year.

WARNING: Next year’s Christmas requirements will be completely different, you will be notified of the changes on Christmas Eve and expected to act accordingly.

Seems Legit...
Personally I shall go back to the maths problem - now where is the bottle of Chateau 41?
Cheers