End-of-term report cards: from the last mark to the signed report

End-of-term report cards take about six weeks from the first reminder to the copy in the file, and most of what goes wrong can be traced back to three dates nobody fixed early enough: the marks closing date, the meeting that decides (a class conference, a report meeting, a conseil de classe) and the report day. Fix those first. After that the order is always the same: teachers enter the last marks and write their comments by the closing date; the class teacher reads the whole class — every child, every subject — and chases the gaps; the meeting decides what your rules leave to it; the head reads and signs; the office prints or releases the reports; and a copy of what was issued is kept. Report card comments are the part families read most closely, so they have their own section below, with examples.

This guide works with any software; Bildena's part, and its limits, come at the end.

What a school report has to contain

The rules depend on where you are. Three examples:

• England. The DfE's guide for headteachers says that by the end of each summer term, headteachers must send parents a written report on their child's progress for the year. It may be split across the year, for example one report per term. For every year group it lists general progress; brief particulars of achievements, highlighting strengths and developmental needs; how to arrange a discussion about the report with a teacher; and the attendance record. Statutory assessment results are added in the years that have them.
• Germany. Each Land sets its own rules and forms. Lower Saxony's report decree (Zeugniserlass of 10 November 2023, in force until the end of 2029) shows how precise they can be: a report at the end of every half-year; the subject teacher sets the subject mark; the class conference decides working habits and social behaviour on the class teacher's proposal, in five fixed levels with a short reason; the form prints whole days missed and how many were unexcused; the report is dated the day it is handed out. A subject mark that moves by more than one grade since the last half-year is discussed at the conference.
• France. The conseil de classe closes each assessment period, three times a year as a rule. The professeur principal usually drafts the overall comment, and the head answers for the comments. The council can award encouragements or félicitations but cannot impose a sanction, and sanctions do not belong on the bulletin.

Whatever applies to you, put it on one page before the round starts: which marks, which comments, who decides what, who signs.

The timeline: count back from report day

Plan backwards from the day the reports go home. A conference held the day after the closing date leaves the class teacher no time to read the class.

When	What happens	Who
6–8 weeks before	Closing date, conference and report day in the calendar. Template or form checked. Pupil records checked: names as on the official documents, dates of birth, class lists.	Head, office
4–6 weeks before	Warning letters to families of children at risk, where your rules require them before the report.	Class teacher, head
3–4 weeks before	Last assessments. Teachers start their comments. Children with too few marks to decide on are spotted now.	Subject teachers
2 weeks before	Marks closing date: every mark in, period results set, subject comments drafted.	Subject teachers
10–7 days before	The class teacher's overview: empty cells, children below the pass mark, large changes since the last report; the general comment.	Class teacher
About 1 week before	The conference or report meeting: the decisions it alone takes, recorded per child.	Head, teachers of the class
3–5 days before	The head's read; last corrections.	Head, deputy
1–2 days before	Printing and signatures, or the online release prepared.	Office
Report day	Reports handed out or released; families told how to discuss them.	Class teacher
After	Issued copies filed; any correction made as a new document.	Office

Marks: the closing date, the average and the rounding

The closing date is the day after which a mark only changes with a reason. Three habits make it hold:

• A list per class, not per teacher. Two weeks before the closing date, the class teacher sees which subjects still lack marks, and asks then — not at the conference.
• One rule for the average, written down. Which assessments count, how much each kind weighs (written work against oral work, say) and how a result exactly between two marks is rounded. Wrong averages usually come from a spreadsheet: a range that stops one row short, an unweighted mean where a weighted one was agreed, a different rounding in two subjects.
• The average beside the mark. In many systems the teacher sets the period mark and the average only suggests it. That is legitimate, but show both side by side, so that a gap of a whole grade is a decision someone can explain, not a typing error.

Writing report card comments parents understand

A comment is read at the kitchen table, often twice, sometimes by a parent who does not read the school's language well. Three sentences do most of the work:

1. What the child can do now, with one piece of evidence.
2. The one next step — one, not five.
3. How home can help, if there is something real to ask.

Some examples, before and after:

Before	After	What changed
“Tom is a pleasure to have in class.”	“Tom asks for help as soon as he is stuck and explains his method to his partner in maths. Next term he will check each answer against an estimate before moving on.”	What he does, and one next step.
“Must try harder.”	“Aisha handed in homework in 9 of the 14 weeks. When it is done, her written answers are among the most careful in the class. From January she will show her planner to her form tutor every Monday.”	The problem as a fact, the strength, a plan.
“Working towards the expected standard in number.”	“Leo adds fractions with the same denominator confidently. Next he needs to find a common denominator; ten minutes a week with the fraction cards we sent home will help.”	No jargon; the family can act on it.
“Sara is disruptive.”	“In whole-class discussion Sara often speaks while others are talking; in group work she is focused and reliable. We have agreed a signal she uses when she wants to speak.”	Behaviour, not character; both sides.

The rules that prevent the most embarrassment:

• No surprises. A problem that first appears on the report should have been a phone call weeks earlier.
• Check names and pronouns in every comment that began as a copy of another. A report with another child's name in it is the mistake families remember.
• No comparisons with siblings, the class or last year's pupils.
• Last term's comment is a starting point, not a template. Keep what is still true; change the next step.
• Short is kinder. Three to five sentences are enough; a long comment is usually a vague one.

Comments are easiest to write from notes taken during the term — “read a whole chapter aloud without help, 12 November” — not from memory in the last week. Lower Saxony's decree even asks teachers to record observations regularly, so that the marks can be traced back to them.

The class teacher's overview and the conference

Before the meeting, the class teacher reads the class as one grid: every child down the side, every subject across, the general comment and any behaviour levels at the end. What to look for:

• empty cells — a mark not decided, a comment not written;
• children below the pass mark, and whether their families were warned in time where your rules require it;
• large jumps since the last report, which the meeting should hear explained;
• the record behind the paper: names, dates of birth, the class.

The meeting then has a short agenda: the decisions only it can take (promotion, behaviour levels, a recommendation for the next school), the children at risk, and whatever the class teacher flagged. Record each decision with the child's name; if a family appeals, the minutes are the school's answer.

Sign-off, printing and release to families

The head's read is the last check before a report becomes a document. Read a sample from every class rather than every page of one, and check the paper itself — school name, year and period, date, signature lines — once per template. Then:

• Print a day or two early, so a misprint can be redone and signatures collected.
• Release on report day, not before — online and on paper on the same day.
• Tell families how to discuss the report. In England the guide requires it. The letter that goes with the reports is the place for it (see Letters home that families read — and answer), and a parents' evening soon after gives the conversation a date (see Parent-teacher day without the spreadsheet).
• File a copy of what was issued, exactly as issued. How long it is kept is set by your local rules.

What usually goes wrong

• Late marks. One subject arrives the evening before the conference. Put the closing date two weeks before report day and track it per class.
• A missing comment. One child in thirty is skipped, and it is noticed while printing. Count comments written against comments needed, per class and per writer.
• Name and date errors. A name spelled differently from the record, a wrong date of birth, last year's period name on the paper, a report dated the day it was printed instead of the day it is handed out.
• Absence figures that do not match. The register counts lessons, the report says days. Say which unit you print, take it from the register, and settle the excuse notes before the closing date (see “She's ill today”: from a phone call to a closed absence).
• A correction that overwrites. A mistake found after the reports went home is corrected with a new report that says which one it replaces. The old one stays on file.

How Bildena runs the report round

The dates and the list. In the school year's calendar, each period has its grades due date, class conference and report date. Grades › Reports lists every class's report with its steps, what it is waiting for, and the hand-out day.

Marks. The gradebook suggests each period result as a weighted average of the marks, by category; where the teacher sets the result, the suggestion stays visible beside it. In the report wizard's Marks step, every child and every subject are on one grid. A subject is decided by whoever the school names — the subject teacher, or the class conference with school management confirming — and a decided subject is final until it is undone.

Texts. The class teacher writes each child's “Learning and working together” paragraph; in a class without marks, each subject teacher writes that subject's text. Every child has a box of up to 4,000 characters, with last period's text beside it (“Start from it”) and the notes kept on the child during the year. Texts lock when their subject is decided and when the reports are published. Bildena does not write comments for you and has no comment bank.

Behaviour and the conference. Where the Land gives conduct marks (Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Lower Saxony and Hesse), subject teachers propose, the class teacher sets the class's proposal and school management sets what the report prints, with a short reason where the form needs one. The Conference step shows what the class's promotion rule found for each child, the decision and the at-risk letters; the class teacher prepares, school management records.

Check and publish. Four checks — marks, texts, behaviour, date and place of birth — each lead back to their step. Publishing waits until every subject is decided (on Lower Saxony's forms, also until every behaviour level has its reason and every child's date and place of birth is in the record); a missing text only leaves its paragraph empty. Only school management publishes. Publishing issues each child's report as a PDF with its own number and a SHA-256 fingerprint, and the family then sees its own child's report in its account; before that, staff see drafts stamped “Draft · not published”. Before the hand-out day, management can withdraw the reports and publish again; after it, a correction issues a new report that names the one it replaces.

The paper. Print all reports gives one A4 page per child, or one PDF for the class. The school's report-card template sets the order of the parts, the absence line and the signature lines — class teacher, head, parent or guardian (seen) — which are signed by hand. The absence line comes from the register: lessons missed this period, and how many without an excuse. Management and the office can download a school year's issued papers as one ZIP file with an index.

Official forms. For schools in Lower Saxony, reports and leaving certificates are written on the Land's forms from the 2023 decree, in German, counting whole days missed as the form asks. Everywhere else — the other Länder, England, France — Bildena prints its own report paper in the school's language (English, German or French), which is not a state form.

What Bildena does not do

• No official form outside Lower Saxony.
• No electronic signature: the paper carries signature lines; the head's sign-off in Bildena is publishing.
• No comment per subject where the subject gives marks: such a report carries the marks and the class teacher's paragraph. Subject comments exist only for subjects without marks.
• No comment bank and no automatic comments.
• No transfer of report data to state systems — not France's livret scolaire unique, not a German Land's administration software, not England's common transfer file.
• Attendance on its own paper is counted in lessons, not in sessions or percentages; a school in England that reports sessions takes those figures from its MIS.

A checklist for the report round

1. Six to eight weeks out: the three dates in the calendar; template or form and pupil records checked.
2. Warning letters sent where your rules require them, by their deadline.
3. One written rule for averages and rounding; the average beside every set mark.
4. Closing date: every mark in, every period result set.
5. Comments counted per child and writer; names and pronouns checked.
6. Class teacher's overview: no empty cells, children at risk listed, large changes explained.
7. Conference decisions recorded per child.
8. Head's read: a sample of every class, the paper once per template.
9. Print a day or two ahead; release online on report day, not before.
10. Families told how to discuss the report.
11. Issued copies filed; corrections as new documents.

Frequently asked questions

Who should write the general comment?

The class teacher or form tutor, who sees the child across subjects. In a French collège or lycée the professeur principal usually drafts it for the conseil de classe.

Should report card software write the comments?

Comment banks and drafting tools save typing, but a comment that could be about any child tells a family nothing, and families notice copied sentences. Whatever you use, the teacher stands behind every word.

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Gradebooks, the report wizard and the family's account are part of Bildena School: €5 per pupil a year, at least €1,000 a school. In the free month you try every module with a sample school, then with your own data — no card needed. Comparing systems? See Choosing a school management system.