What the monthly note is for

Ask most teachers how a student is doing and you will get a kind answer. Kind answers are not useless, but they are not a record, and a parent cannot plan around one.

So every student here gets a short written note each month, and it always contains the same four things. The fixed shape is the point: a free-form update tends to describe whatever happened most recently, which is usually the last class rather than the month.

The four parts

1. What was covered — pages, surahs or rules, by name. Checkable against the book.
2. What is holding — the things that were shaky last month and are not any more. The part everyone skips, and the part a student most needs to hear read out.
3. What needs work — named specifically. Not “needs to practise more”, but which letters, which line, which rule.
4. What to do at home — one thing, not five. If a note asks for five things, nothing happens.

What it is not

It is not a grade, a percentage, or a ranking against anybody else. There is no cohort to rank against in one-to-one teaching, and inventing one would be both meaningless and unkind. It is also not the only time to raise something: if a class went badly on a Tuesday, that is a message on the Tuesday, not a line in a note three weeks later.

How to read one

Read the “holding” section out loud to the student. It is the only part of the month that tells them the work is accumulating, and it is the part a child never notices on their own — improvement is invisible from the inside because the new normal feels like it was always normal.

Then do the one thing in the last section, and nothing else. Parents who attempt the whole note tend to sustain it for nine days. One item, for a month, is what actually changes the next note.