M - up 2 levels to level 10 
A - up 3 levels to level 10  
S - up 2 levels to level 10 
J - level 7, back after extended leave
A3 -  up 1 levels to level 7
M3 - doing better with HFW, now up to level 5. Will remove from target students as a year 0, tracking above.

Interesting
D - solid letter sound knowledge and is now reading his name consistently, as well as Mum & Dad. Will start him with 30mins 1:1 a day on LLI programme focussing on building his sight words as he is very motivated by words at the moment. 

Minus
Nothing comes to mind

Academically though, I finished the year feeling that I had failed these students, but also angry at a national standard that doesn't recognize just how varied student learning pathways were. I felt that these children were not developmentally ready for the early reading and writing programme of school. They need 2 years more in the sand, construction and the dress-up boxes. 

On the other hand I felt there was a huge professional and pedagogical danger of just blaming developmental readiness. Doesn't it give us the perfect excuse for a student's failure to achieve. This is just victim blaming and at the end of the day, they are only 5, and I am the experienced and trained educator, so the responsibility for their progress or not is all mine. The research above has spurred me to accept my responsibility to engage in deliberate acts of teaching that cause learning. 

I then take this data and plot it on two separate graphs. The first graph shows students achievement against their number of weeks at school. This is the graph I have traditionally used. The data points connected by pencil are my target students. ​Pleasingly it shows significant progress across the class, with most children tracking on or above national standards. 

This year I am working in a collaborative professional inquiry of 3 teachers. We are documenting our meetings on a shared google doc as well as documenting data and analysis in a large scrap book. At times it feels like we are repeating ourselves, doubling or trebling our workload as we are recording data in multiple places. On the other hand, the scrapbook in particular is helpful in focussing the data on our target students, rather than the class as a whole.

Already I am seeing changes in my practice that appear to be contributing to strong gains in reading, our gaol area. The biggest challenge now is to find ways to support a similar growth in reading for my newbies who have just arrived into a very different classroom environment than the initial children experienced.