SATS scores & Year 3 levels ... I am totally flummoxed

[SATSdunce]

Please can someone explain it to me in an easy-peasy way?

Dd, last year, got the following for her SATS:

Reading: 3
Writing: 3
Maths: 2b

Just had parents evening a couple of weeks ago and the teacher says she's at:

Reading: 3a
Writing: 3b
Maths: 2b

Does that mean that she's changed for reading / writing but not maths? she also said that she's meant to go up 2 subsets but the end of the year making her a 4b for reading and writing which on her chart was the average score for a child in Year 6. Surely that's not right?!

I really don't get it.

Help!

[coppertop]

A sub-set refers to the a,b,c part of the score, not the number.

It would go:

2b
2a
3c

So your dd should be a 3c by the end of the year.

[janeyjampot]

4b is the average score in Yr6, and is the target for a child who gets 2b at the end of keystage 1 - the 'average' in the infants.

If a child gets a 3 at the end of the infants, then their target should be 5 at the end of the juniors. Thus targets for each year are as follows:

End of Yr2: (assume) 3c
End of Yr3: goes up 2 sublevels to 3a
End of Yr4: up another 2 sublevels to 4b
End of Yr5: up another 2 sublevels to 5c
End of Yr6: 5a

Does that make sense?

FWIW I think your DD has done well to get up to 3a at this stage in reading, because I definitely remember a lot of explanation about levels not being entirely transferable from infants to juniors (teacher said that 3c in infants requires lower attainment than 3c in juniors because the way these are assessed is different) and adjusting from infants to juniors can be a bit of a shock as well.

[Feenie]

Nope. Since 2005, when the y2 assessent became teacher assessment only, this hasn't been a problem. The exact same assessment procedure should be used to determine teacher assessment levels at y2 and y3, so there shouldn't be a difference in y2/y3 levelling.

[SATSdunce]

Thanks for your patience! Some of this is beginning to make sense now, thanks.

So if dd ended Y2 at 3C, how is she suddenly now at 3A? Will they have been assessed again already and she's been moved up two subsets?

One of my concerns is that as her teacher is very young and this is her first appointment, she will have made some kind of crucial mistake. Not that I don't think dd is good with her reading and writing because she is, but she doesn't seem to have improved since last year, certainly not enough to go up two subsets in a few weeks! Can the teachers sometimes get it totally wrong?

The numeracy score seems right, she's bang slap average with it and that makes sense to me.

[SATSdunce]

Janeyjampot - teacher says dd is at 3a NOW and will be at 4b at the end of THIS year. Surely that's a mistake, looking at your calculations it would seem to be.

[SATSdunce]

So end of Y6 she'd be at 6a???

[Feenie]

You don't know what kind of a level 3 she was in Y2, since the sublevels at level 3 don't have to be reported.

The school will most certainly know - she may have been a 3a, therefore, in Y2 and would be targetted to reach a 4b by the end of y3.

Schools are required to target chidren to make good progress - that's so that they are seen to be aspirational. So they say children should make 2 sublevels progress per year. To make satisfactory progress, children have to move 2 whole levels between Y2 and Y6 - so that's actually one and a half sublevels per year.

Your child has been given a target to make good progress, and that may well be what happens - however, children tend not to learn in neat little jumps like this, so some years they make more progress than others.

I would ensure that progress is being made, if she was my dd, and above all make sure she continues to enjoy what she reads! Far more improtant than any target.

[Feenie]

However, if she were to make good progress every year:

Y3 - 4b
Y4 - 5c
Y5 - 5a
Y6 - 6b

Which is perfectly possible and does happen!

[SATSdunce]

Thank you Feenie. And would a 6b be something that a certain amount of children get per year?

[lovecheese]

But dont forget tha children don't make nice little sub-levels of progress all the time, they have peaks and plateaus.

[lovecheese]

Eg my DD made 5 sub-levels of progress between finishing reception and the end of year one, to put her on a 2a; Supposing she carried on at this pace, she would be something like an 11c!! at the end of year 6, which is just mad, I don't think it even goes as high as 9? I know this is an extreme example and absolutely unrealistic, but could you imagine? She'd be in the paper.

[Feenie]

Depends on the school - we usually have two or three in a class of 20.

[Talkinpeace]

NB
ALL kids slip at least one fine scale point over the summer holiday
unless they have the sort of sad parents that make them work the whole time

also, at KS2 there is much more emphasis on actual written work which knocks lots of boys back a fine scale point till they get used to it

BUT
Having as a school governor had to do analysis of Raiseonline and Fischer Family Trust
the standard deviation of error on any grading in a one form entry school is TWO fine scale points.
At which point you see why I'm pretty cynical about the whole shebang!

[Feenie]

Class of 30, sorry.

"NB ALL kids slip at least one fine scale point over the summer holiday
unless they have the sort of sad parents that make them work the whole time

also, at KS2 there is much more emphasis on actual written work which knocks lots of boys back a fine scale point till they get used to it"

That's not my experience as a teacher and a governor, Talkinpeace - I find the last observation particularly bizarre! The assessment used to assess writing should be the same across both key stages - so no boys should be dropping anything!

[IndigoBell]

Summer holidays are only 6 weeks.

A lot of the research about kids dropping back over summer was done in the US where there summer holidays are much longer.

[lovecheese]

Jinx

[SATSdunce]

Yes, I'm sure that would be the case.

[SATSdunce]

Hmmph - about saddo parents making their kids work over the summer! I often find that in the summer dd spends a lot of her time alone and with friends writing and drawing because that's what they find fun and a lot of their games involve things like that. Nothing to do with me. As for reading, she's got more time to read in the summer as we're not always dashing off to school or coming in from school tired or doing homework. So I think in that respect without me being a saddo at all, she might well have gone up a level or so, just because she's had time to focus on reading and writing in a different way.

As she's not so enthused with maths and probably didn't write or think about a single number during the whole summer vacation!

[Talkinpeace]

I was being mean.
A tennis mum I know made her kids do written school work every day of the summer
then wondered why they went off the rails as teenagers.
They had never learned to amuse themselves and did nothing for its own pleasure.

Feenie - if it has improved since DS was at that stage (he's year 6 now) Good. But of course schools vary in their "effectiveness"

[Feenie]

It should have been the same 4 years ago - sounds like excuses were made, perhaps!

[Talkinpeace]

Feenie
which may be why I am an ex Governor and counting the days till DS goes into year 7

[Feenie]

I see