Rethinking What We Illuminate in Student Reporting

In the unclearly attributed story of the Streetlight Effect, it is dark, and a man is crawling on the pavement beneath a single streetlight. A passerby stops and asks what he is doing. The man replies that he is searching determinedly for something he has lost.

Like any parent whose child has misplaced something, the passerby asks, "Where do you think you lost it?"

"Way over there," the man replies, gesturing vaguely into the darkness.

The passerby pauses. "Then why are you looking here?"

Exasperated, the man answers, "Because this is where the light is shining."

The school-aged child, like the rest of us, is complex. If we try to understand that complexity by looking in only one place, we will uncover only a small part of the story. Too often, this is what assessment in schools does. And its fraternal twin, the school report, frequently does the same. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie warned her audience of the dangers of the “single story,” and one problem with the traditional report is that it does that very thing. 

At Aiglon College, an international boarding school in Switzerland, we do not just say we value holism; it is part of our DNA. We recognize that reports need to be manageable to write, and digestible to read. But we embrace a plurality of student stories, and would like our reports to do the same. This raises a central question: how can we communicate complexity without reducing it? In this article, we wrestle with that challenge, reflecting not only on our ongoing work, but also the questions it has raised, and the challenges that remain unresolved. 

Our aim has been to create a report that better reflects the complexity of students' learning and development. For example, while each subject is traditionally presented as a separate experience, a holistic report—in essence, an interdisciplinary artifact—would step back and consider all subjects and their many entanglements together. This will mean shining the light in old shadows and new places, and changing well-worn habits too. While the traditional school’s role began and ended at the school gates, we now know that what happens at home matters too. This becomes even more complex in a boarding school like Aiglon, where, during term time, a student’s home is also their school. 

Some schools have responded by adopting competency-based reporting, seeking to bridge these traditional silos. We found much to admire in these approaches, but we also recognized two important limitations. 

First, any attempt to make something as complex as child and adolescent development fit neatly into any reporting framework risks reducing it. Whether we report grades or competencies, we inevitably simplify. Competencies may illuminate parts of a student’s story that grades cannot, and neither can illuminate everything. Therefore, competencies may belong within a holistic report, but they cannot become the report itself.

Second, competencies are not linguistically or culturally neutral. The language we choose carries different meanings across different linguistic and cultural contexts. In international schools, where students bring diverse histories and ways of understanding the world, this matters greatly. Students need opportunities to explore what competencies mean within their own lives, identities, and ancestries, not simply inherit definitions created elsewhere. Because of these limitations, competencies will be a part of our holistic approach, but not the entirety. 

The initial challenge was the question of ownership. Teachers were reluctant to relinquish control to the student—control over where the light is allowed to shine, and how brightly. Similarly, students lacked the confidence to take control of the light in the first place, and questioned whether their voice was loud enough to earn that agency. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is taking time for climate and culture to recalibrate, so that both students and teachers trust each other and the process itself. 

We still have a great deal of distance to travel. Grades continue to exert a powerful pull, offering the reassuring certainty of number, while narrative, whilst richer in meaning, can feel too subjective, and lacking in clarity. But one encouraging development has already emerged: parents are beginning to value the longitudinal picture created through students’ own reflections, seeing growth not as a sequence of isolated achievements, but as an unfolding journey.

And this has helped us identify the three roles within any report, about which we have found ourselves returning to three deceptively simple questions.

1. Who should author a holistic report? Should it be written by teachers, students, or a genuine partnership between the two? 

We have decided there should be as much student ownership as possible, with teachers as guides. This allows students to make concrete decisions about their report: where its spotlight shines, and what is illuminated when. We are working towards an input ratio of 50:50 (teacher:student), whereas, at the moment, the holistic report gives students only a third of this authorship, and this cannot be enough. 

2. What should be its subject? What is it about? 

The answer is a list so long that it could not be contained at all, so we flip that. Essentially, the subject of the report is the student as a traveler, and the report needs to articulate each stage of their journey: looking back at where they have travelled and offering a glimpse into their future, whilst shining the streetlight in every corner of the present. The playwright David Mamet, in talking about realism and truth in the context of theatre, says, “Everything which does not contribute to the meaning of the play impedes the meaning of the play.”  Swap “meaning of the play” for “story of the student,” and you are pretty much there.

3. And who is the report really for? The student, their family, universities, employers?

Each of these could stake a claim. But Aiglon’s holistic reporting is, fundamentally, for the student. It is an instrument of formative assessment, through which the student can better understand themselves and their learning. Therefore, just as the student can be author and subject both, so also can and must they be the audience. They may invite their parents to share the reading of their reported story, just as, in a student-led conference, in effect, they have invited their parents and teacher. Because as soon as the report becomes the property of somebody else, so does their story and we must avoid that at any cost.

If we think about the medium—or the language—of our report, we need to decide whether it should be narrative, grades and scores, a mixture of these, or something else entirely. And this challenge is complicated further when we think of the competing interests involved. The teacher wants the process to be useful for the child, but also the best possible use of their own time. The student, meanwhile, needs and deserves it to be engaging, authentic, and of genuine use to them—if we want them to invest in something they have long feared. And different parents might want it to be thorough and comprehensive, clear and easy to digest, or even as proof of value in relation to fees paid.

Before we go too far down Competency Street, there is work to do, not least with what each competency means across a multilingual and multicultural cocktail of intersectional identities. For instance, if collaboration were a competency, do we simply adopt the meaning of the word, “collaborative,” in English? Then what of the word(s) which describe this process, or the closest equivalent of it, in other languages, and other sociocultural contexts? How will it arrive for the parent who will receive it too, and for the student, often living in the liminal space between school and home? In a different context, we are already looking at how we can ensure a community-wide consensus of the key words in our guiding statements, our values, our Guiding Principles and our Pathways. Therefore, if we are to steer towards competencies, it makes sense to include those words in this exercise too.

Another important step in the paradigm shift was to decide whether one experience equals a unit or whether students should decide where their experiences lie on a scale, if there is even a scale in the first place. For example, climbing a local Swiss peak for the first time may be far more impactful for a child who grew up in central Tokyo than for someone who has grown up on skis. So if an experience cannot be quantified, then what would it look like on our report? The same goes for every part of the holistic report, which begs the question, could our new reports eschew scales entirely? These are the questions we are asking ourselves at every point in our reporting journey so far. 

After all, at Aiglon, we recognize that much of what matters in a student’s development sits beyond what can be easily captured in letters, numbers, or scaled descriptors. Like the man in the Streetlight story, there is a risk that we only see what is illuminated, while other important aspects of growth and progress remain hidden somewhere in the shadows. A holistic report, therefore, must look beyond what is easiest to measure and attempt to represent the balanced development of mind, body, and spirit. For example, the embodiment of fairness should hold equal value to the mastery of a complex set of mathematical tools. And this equality should be made visible, not hidden.

Future iterations of our holistic report will attempt to break the silos and boundaries created by discrete subjects, and also those caused by the academic-pastoral divide. Like the London Interdisciplinary School, whose single university degree is transdisciplinary at every juncture, so too could an Aiglon education in the future destroy the silos altogether. We are drawn, as educators, towards the tidiness of the compartmentalized self. But throughout this pilot, it has become clear that the “self” is so much richer, broader, and deeper than the sum of its parts. Remembering this will be critical as we develop our holistic reports further.

Perhaps the purpose of a holistic report is not to illuminate everything equally, but to acknowledge that different aspects of a student’s development require different kinds of light. Some things can be measured, others can only be described, and many exist in the spaces between. Our work has not been to resolve this tension, but to make it visible. In doing so, the report becomes less a final judgment and more a continuing conversation, a way for students to recognise themselves, not as fixed outcomes, but as human beings still becoming.