Enter baseline assessment results for your new intake during the autumn term and let CASPA manage these to give you full-year analysis. A baseline assessment for a new pupil may be part-way through the year and you can always use this in CASPA to understand whether that pupil appears to be on track to meet targets.  However, to understand whether a pupil made expected progress across the whole year, you need to start with a result that reasonably represents where the pupil was at the end of the previous year. It is generally regarded as reasonable to use a baseline assessment for your new intake in the autumn term as the same level the pupil was likely to have achieved at the end of the previous summer term.  To support this, any result entered or imported in the autumn term (for a pupil with no historic data) will be copied back to the previous summer term as part of the save/import process. Some of the abilities this will unlock include:

• When target setting for your new intake, you can immediately use CASPA’s benchmarks to identify expected progress to the end of the year using these baselines as the effective start of new year/end of previous year results.  This is powerful data that informs any target you select
• Year on year analysis starts immediately.  Without this, your first end of year data would be summer 2020 coming meaning you would have to wait until summer 2021 for the first full year analysis.  Allowing CASPA to copy the baselines back gives you full year comparisons from summer 2019 and target tracking immediately
• Key Stage reporting obviously relies on having results from the end of one Key Stage to the end of the next Key Stage.  Last summer will have been the end of a Key Stage for some pupils who arrive(d) in a school this September and you will want your Key Stage reporting and planning to include these pupils.  If you don’t have their end of Key Stage data to record in CASPA, their baseline assessment will become their end of Key Stage results

This saves you significant effort, avoiding the need for you to manually enter the same results to the previous year’s fields in CASPA.  However, remember that CASPA will only do this during the autumn term. It would certainly not be reasonable to assume a mid-year result, for example a result from a February assessment, was the level the pupil was working at the end of the previous year so CASPA will not copy levels back to the previous year in the spring or summer terms.  You can still add results to historic years yourself (via Data | Advanced tasks | CASPA historic data), but if you have genuine autumn term new intake baseline assessments, it is less effort if you can let CASPA do it before the cut-off at the end of December each year.

So how do I do this?

If you import your data into CASPA, just import the baselines as you would normally.  These will be imported, just as you might expect, as current results recorded as the level the pupil had achieved on the date entered during the autumn term.  However, if there is no historic data for the pupil either already recorded in CASPA or within the file being imported, CASPA will automatically copy these levels to the summer 2019 fields.

If you enter data manually, you should go to the current year tab (2019/2020) on the main data entry pages and enter the baselines as current results.  If there is no historic data for the pupil already recorded in CASPA, saving the changes will result in CASPA automatically copying these levels to the summer 2019 fields.