Y7 accelerated cirriculum

[Dingle]

Could someone please give me a quick indication of what grades I should expect my DS to be getting. He is one of the very youngest in his Y7 Grammar school which is on an accelerated cirriculum.

He has just had his first grade card come home and the attainments and targets are over quite a wide range!

Any advice would be appreciated!

[roisin]

A range of results is normal - are they his "current working levels?"

Generally Maths/English/Science should correspond broadly to his levels in primary.

So if he got 5c at primary in English then something similar now would be good. (Though some students do dip over summer and the secondary level descriptors are different to the primary ones.)

MFL start from scratch, so their levels are lower than the others.

[roisin]

Is he enjoying it and doing well?

[roisin]

As a broad brush stroke Ofsted (and so on) count as "good" progress if a student progress two whole levels from end of yr6 to the end of yr7. So broken down this would be two sub-levels per year at school.

eg. end yr6: 5c -> end yr7: 5a -> end yr8: 6b -> end yr9: 7c

Though it should be added that students on higher levels (5+) tend to continue to make faster progress than others. (But Ofsted don't seem to take this into account )

[Dingle]

Thank you,that makes it a bit clearer.

His grades for behaviour and effort all excellents and goods so that's a great start!

I don't understand how the targets have been worked out. According to the letter the explaination reads "target:based on past performance and teacher judgement, an ambitious grade, achievable by the end of year 8."

DS has an attainment of 4b for english with a target of 6a! Maths- attainment 6c with a target of 7a, science 5a with a target of 7b.......French he only got 2c with a target of 2a, spanish 3a with a target of 6a...etc.

[roisin]

They do sound like steep targets, but that's good that they are ambitious and are pushing them.

They look to me like fairly standard targets for the end of yr9. So what they're claiming to do with their "accelerated curriculum" is to get the students to yr9 standard by the end of yr8.

The targets probably don't relate so much to current attainment, but rather to KS2 SATs results, CATs, 11+ results (this is a selective school, isn't it?), etc. Plus any other contributory factors.

[2a seems very low target for French though. Do they do that full time for two years?]

Does that mean they do options at the end of yr8 and start the GCSE courses early?

[Dingle]

Thank you for your message Roisin!x

Yes, the school aim to complete KS3 in year 7 & 8.

We have Parent's Evening at the beginning of December so I will hopefully get a better idea of how he is doing then.

I suppose I am worried about him struggling. We have been used to him being at the top of his Primary school and now we just need to let him find his own level in Grammar School.

They do 2 languages in Y7 and from what I know of, DS does 3 x 40minute lessons a week for each language. How can the target levels for French & Spanish differ so much?

On a positive note, he seems to have settled in very well considering he is a late August "baby" and is VERY happy there socially and emotionally.

[roisin]

It's great that he's so happy there and so settled.

I have no answers as to why the target levels for French and Spanish are so different; this sounds like a question for parent's evening. Maybe the French teacher is new and didn't understand the reporting process properly..?!

[kat2504]

Sounds like the French teacher has either made a mistake or mistakenly provided a target for the end of yr7 instead. Even so it seems quite low given that your son is achieving well above average in other subjects. Even if French is a totally new subject, an average ability year 7 could get up to a 3 in a year. (I'm a French teacher)

[daphnedill]

I agree it seems strange that the grades for French and Spanish differ so much.

I teach MFL in a comprehensive. I'm in the middle of marking some Year 7 assessments. My pupils started German in September and the results range from 2b to 3a. We have three one hour lessons a fortnight.

To be honest, 2c seems very low to me, especially for a dc at grammar school. However, the levels mean b*gger all at this stage, as so little vocabulary will have been learnt. Levels were never intended to be used to monitor pupil progress, but as a grade to be given at the end of a keystage. The "sublevels" don't even officially exist, but are what the school decides. The NC levels for MFL are, in any case, a nonsense.