'P' levels - what are they and who can assess them?

[misscutandstick]

as title really.

Ive heard a lot about people knowing their childs 'p' levels, but i dont know what they are, i did google but didnt get back the right results.

TIA

[MIAonline]

P levels are for children working below National curriculum levels. Afaik, a teacher uses them to assess progress and to show developments, broken down in to small chunks

link here

[r3dh3d]

Yes. They are supposed to be in fairly plain english, so there's no professional assessment as such - it's what the teacher feels the child is currently achieving.

They sort of blend "educational" progress with "developmental" progress and also take into account PMLD-style barriers to learning.

They're worth reading because if your child is SLD/PMLD they influence their IEP: the school will be working to move the child up the P scales, as a lot of the progress especially at the lower end is about developing the ability to learn other things later on.

[misscutandstick]

Thanks MIA, that answers it beautifully!

huge thanks for the link too

[misscutandstick]

R3 there is some debate as to the learning potential of DS5, at 3.3yrs he has development delay of 2yrs, has low understanding and is non-verbal. but he can sign/understand around 80 signs (all nouns) to the vocab generally used by an 18mth child. so is it the delay causing what seems to be learning difficulties or does he have learning difficulties? we will have to wait and see.

At a quick glance his ability seems to lay somewhere between p2 and p3. But for a non-verbal developmentally delayed pre-schooler, i assume its about average?