Every report sent home this year will be well written. Not every one will be about a child.
By Eden Mitchell, co-creator of TeacherGPT
Picture a parent at the kitchen bench in December, reading their kid’s report.
The writing is clean. The tone is warm and professional. The language is accessible, and every sentence lands.
And the parent thinks: this could be about anyone.
That’s the risk this Term 4. Not that parents will work out a teacher used AI — most won’t care, and honestly, they shouldn’t. The risk is that reports come home beautifully written and completely interchangeable, and a parent quietly concludes that the person who wrote it doesn’t really know their child.
That conclusion is very hard to recover from.
Two things happened at once
The first is the new reporting requirements. From 2026, all state and state-integrated schools are reporting against the revised Years 0–10 English and Maths & Statistics learning areas, using new Progress Descriptors and five common components.
Four of those five components are data. They’re standardised, and that’s the whole point — parents should be able to compare progress meaningfully, and teachers shouldn’t be reinventing a reporting format every year. This is a good change.
But look at what it does to the narrative. Here’s a full Reading report with the four data components greyed out, and only the narrative left in.
Everything in grey is accurate and useful, but generic.
That one box is now the only place on the page where the report can be about a specific child. It is carrying more weight than it ever has. Most Term 4 reports also include a general comment about the child, and that’s usually where a teacher’s knowledge is most visible. But it’s one paragraph, and Reading, Writing and Maths are the sections parents go back to.
The second thing is that we all started using AI. ERO’s national review, published in July, found more than 90 percent of New Zealand principals and more than 80 percent of teachers are using it — leaders mostly for drafting messages and summarising, teachers mostly for planning and resources. ERO also found most schools are still working this out as they go, with individual teachers largely deciding for themselves how and when to use it.
The result is a format where personalisation is concentrated into one box, meeting a workforce that has just acquired a very fast way to fill boxes.
Why this is going to happen to good teachers
I’ve written a class set of Term 4 reports. It’s a genuinely hard job, but “knowing the child” isn’t the hard part.
Any teacher who has spent a year with 25 kids knows them in enormous detail — who reads under the desk, who needs a run before they can sit still, who will read anything with a dinosaur in it.
The hard parts are everything else. Phrasing something delicately. Sounding professional without sounding like a robot. Keeping language accessible for every family in your class. Writing your twenty-fourth comment at 9pm and finding a new way to say “making good progress.”
Which is exactly, precisely, uncannily what AI is good at.
And that’s genuinely good news — this is a real workload problem and there’s now a real tool for it. The catch is what gets handed over.
Feed AI the progress descriptor, the year level and the learning area, and it will return something fluent, warm, professional and accessible. It will also be interchangeable with every other child sitting at that descriptor. It reads fine on its own, but falls apart the moment two parents compare notes in the carpark.
A note on the exemplars
The Ministry has published example reports for Years 2, 4, 7 and 9. They’re useful, and you should look at them.
They’re also generic — they’re about a child who doesn’t exist. The exemplar’s job is to show you the shape.
The mistake to avoid is copying the shape and thinking you’re done. If your reports could be swapped between two students with a find-and-replace on the name, you have produced a compliant document rather than a report.
The fix takes about two minutes
Before you open any tool, write down three things about the kid:
- One thing they did this year that you’d mention if you bumped into their parent at the supermarket.
- One thing that finally clicked — and what made it click.
- One thing they talk about when nobody’s asking them to work.
That’s it. Two minutes, scrappy notes, no full sentences. Then hand that over along with the progress data, and let the AI do the part it’s good at.
You don’t need much. One specific in the narrative, one in the next steps, one in the how-to-help-at-home. Three touches in a whole report is enough to change what a parent feels while reading it.
What that looks like
Here’s a Year 4 reading report written the generic way. Everything in it is true, accurate and professionally worded.
Nothing wrong with it. It’s also completely interchangeable — swap the name and it could go home to any Proficient reader in the country.
Now here are the notes the teacher scribbled down about Maia before opening anything. Two minutes, no full sentences:
- Fantail (Pīwakawaka) inquiry term 3, went hard. was reading info texts way above what she’d normally pick up. didn’t want to stop
- Fiction is a different story. misses what characters are feeling unless it’s spelled out. Retells well, order is fine
- Likes rockets and outer space
And the instruction that went with them:
These are my student notes. Use them to inform the narrative, next steps and how-to-help-at-home for her Year 4 reading report.
Don’t overdo the personal stuff — one specific detail in the narrative, one in the next steps, one in the help-at-home. The rest should be standard reporting language.
That second paragraph is doing as much work as the notes. Without it, a model will thread the pīwakawaka through every sentence and the report starts reading like a bird documentary.
Here’s what comes back, with the personalised parts highlighted:
Same descriptor, same length, same professional vibe. And only three personal touches.
But the second report can only have been written by someone who was in the room.
Look at the help-at-home suggestion in particular. “Read regularly from a range of texts” is advice this family has received every year since Maia started school, and it has never once changed anyone’s evening. “Go and find out how a rocket lands” is something they might actually do on Sunday.
The pattern transfers to anything. A maths comment that mentions division finally landing while she was splitting up her Pokémon cards is a comment parents will read twice.
This isn’t just about feelings
There’s decent evidence that specificity is doing real work here, not just goodwill.
Kraft and Rogers ran a field experiment where teachers sent parents brief individualised messages each week. One sentence. The proportion of students failing to earn course credit dropped from 15.8 percent to 9.3 percent — a 41 percent reduction. And the messages that named something specific the student could improve had the largest effects of all.
One individualised sentence — that was the size of the intervention.
Which reframes the “how you can support your child at home” box entirely. It isn’t a compliance field. It’s the part of the report most likely to change what happens in a home — but only if it’s specific enough for a family to act on.
What leadership teams can do before writing season
Set the expectation before, not after. Once 700 comments are written, you’re stuck with them. A single staff meeting in Week 3 or 4 is the whole intervention.
Give staff the two minutes per child. Dedicate half a staff meeting to it. Class lists out, three scrappy notes per child. Teachers already hold this information; they just need permission to write it down before they’re exhausted.
Add one question to peer-moderation. You’ll already be moderating reports for consistency of judgement — the Ministry has published guidance on it. Add this: could this report have been written about a different child in the class? It takes seconds per report and it catches the problem before a parent does.
The point
The new reporting format makes progress clearer, more consistent and easier to compare. It hands parents better information than they’ve ever had.
AI makes the writing faster, cleaner and less brutal on teachers in Weeks 7–8. Both of those things are good.
But between them they’ve quietly narrowed the space where a Reading, Writing or Maths report can say “I really know this child” down to about three sentences. It’s worth the two minutes.
Eden Mitchell is a former primary teacher and the co-creator of TeacherGPT.