Schools spend days on end-of-term reports. Parents spend about ninety seconds on them, look for one thing - is my child doing well - and file the rest.
That mismatch is fixable, and the fix makes them faster to write.
What gets skimmed
Grade grids. Eight skills scored out of five means nothing without a reference point. A parent cannot tell whether 3/5 for speaking is good for a nine-year-old two terms in.
Generic sentences. "A pleasure to teach and has made good progress." Every parent recognises the template, and its presence quietly suggests nobody looked closely.
Everything hedged. A report with no weakness in it is not reassuring, it is unreadable. Parents assume something is being withheld.
What they keep
A starting point and where they are now. This is why the placement test matters: without a recorded start, progress is an assertion.
One specific observation. "She now volunteers answers without being asked, which she did not do in September." One sentence like this is worth a page of scoring, because only someone who watched their child could write it.
One honest weakness, framed as the next thing. Not a criticism - the thing you are working on next. Parents trust a report more when it contains something to improve, and they will notice next term whether it changed.
One thing to do at home, small and concrete. Ten minutes of reading aloud twice a week beats "encourage practice".
Attendance, plainly. Not buried. It is the one factual number that explains most progress differences, and it belongs where a parent will see it.
Make it possible to write well
If a report takes forty minutes per student, quality will collapse at scale and your teachers will resent the term ending.
Pre-fill everything the system already knows - attendance, homework completion, assessment scores - so the teacher writes only the part that needs a human: the observation, the next thing, the suggestion. That is ten minutes, and it is the ten minutes worth paying for.
Automate the parts that are true. Write only the parts that require having watched a child.
Then send them on time
A report that arrives two weeks into the holiday has lost most of its value. The date is a commitment to families, and missing it costs more goodwill than the content earns.