An end of term score gives you a ranking, not a story. A child who scores 60 may have grown far more than a child who scores 90, if last term they scored 30. Progress only means something when you compare a child with who they were yesterday, not with the child at the next desk. The tools for that don't need to be fancy. These three are enough, and one teacher can run all of them for a whole class.
Tool 1: The running vocabulary chart
One sheet per child, printed with a hundred small squares. Every time a child reads a new word correctly in front of you, they colour in one square. Week by week they watch their own band of colour grow, with nothing to explain. It's a progress graph a Grade 1 pupil understands on sight, and it creates its own pull: they want to fill the next square.
Tool 2: A portfolio of three pieces a term
Collect a child's writing at three points only: the start of term, the middle and the end. Use the same task every time, something like write an introduction to yourself, as much as you can manage. On parents' evening, lay the three sheets side by side. You barely need to say a word. The handwriting and the growing number of sentences tell the whole story, and a parent who can see real progress stops asking why their child isn't top of the class.
Tool 3: The one minute read aloud
Once a month, each child reads a passage at their own level to you for one minute. You count the words they read correctly and write a single number in your notebook. Same child, same level of text: a number that climbs from 12 to 25 to 40 words a minute is a far truer picture of reading than any multiple choice paper. It costs one lesson a month per class, and in return you see every child's growth without guessing.
All three tools point the same way. Make progress visible, and the child, the teacher and the family start pulling in the same direction on their own.