Apologies to Cambridge matmos.

Seeker - I can assure you that I can find lots of local people who would agree with me about how our local system works. Some have kids who have joined dd at her new school. Why should I believe that me & lots of other local parents are all wrong about our local system?

You do seem to .... generalise... from your personal experience a little widely, though... the posters who have challenged you on here have experience of significantly more schools from different perspectives.

pugs I'm off now too but you do appear to be a great generalizer from limited personal experience, which is the problem. And some people here (teacher for example) have very broad knowledge of the system. I think seeker may have previously mentioned that she was a primary governor too?

No - but she is bright enough to know that there is 'a system', to articulate it, and to understand why the grown-ups around her use it in the way that they do. And as she also says 'well, I get lots of house points and ticks and nice comments on my work, and that's my reward'.

Even when everybody says you've misunderstood?

That was for yellow tip btw

So because your dd survived the general lack of encouragement & constantly rewarding the poor achievers that means any child can? That would be one sweeping generalisation!

My children have always known that every child in their school gets 1 certificate. If you get more than 1 during your time there it is, as my daughter put it 'because if you find it harder to behave or harder to do your work, sometimes you need more encouragement'....

One more time, Pugs - the school that your daughter was in did not suit her, and she did not thrive there as well as you might like, and it appears at the moment that her current school suits her better.

None of that has anything to do with 'a system' or 'a sector', just 2 individual schools.

I can only comment on personal experiences, the same as anybody else here.

Surely getting up to the Merchant Bankers Table 1 would have been a reward to strive for? Emancipation and shedding the shackles of Also Rans Table 2?

DD4 (also Y6) has never got more than one of these certificates pugs (except the mandatory 'settling in beautifully' one). She knows the purpose of them in her school is to boost the lower achievers and she's pretty mellow about that. She's furiously competitive despite that sort of stuff and always seems to try. I wouldn't say the school has failed her despite there having been very little outward encouragement. Parents and peer group and all sorts of other factors have to go into the mix too. That probably includes parental attitudes to the school. I guess she may have picked up on the fact that you were at odds with the school, so it could have rubbed off. My policy throughout my DCs schooling has always been to avoid confrontation and never to pester the schools.

You don't have to say the system is perfect. It would be good if you accepted that what you have described is not the system.

The think is, Pugs, based on your complete misunderstanding of how KS1 SATs work, of how EYFS profiles work, and of how secondary / high schools predict GCSE levels, I'm not entirely convinced that you understood the system in operation at your DD's earlier school - and therefore am not going to spend any more of my Sunday explaining how bad it might have been or how Ofsted might have seen it had it (by any remote chance) actually operated as you have supposed.

That does not stop me being sorry that your DD did not thrive there. The school where DS did not thrive, btw, crashed from 'Good with outstanding features' to 'Special measures' within a singe 3 year Ofsted cycle...

But the system as you describe is not they system as it is. Or was.

Seeker - I thought it was obvious that I did not agree with the way the school was working. And how can I say a system is perfect when my main experience of it is poor?

Teacher - I am only suggesting that the system does not work to the advantage of all in it. There are some losers. Is that not a fair assumption?

One last time, pugs. Are you prepared to accept that your/ the head's interpretation of the system was wrong?

As I said before Seeker, this school has never had an inspection under it's current head. The outstanding it currently has is from the time of the old head (don't get how that works but still)

(As is the wish to change from tests to teacher assessment if the results you don't like are produced by tests, or the other way if they were based on teacher assessments. Bizarre, and irrational, as i say)

Again, I am sorry that YOUR DD'S SCHOOL did not have those things.

However, to condemn an entire system based on one school is not the position of a rational person....

Time to give up, I think. To anyone reading this, please don't worry. Pugsandseals has completely misunderstood the system- if whqt she says happened actually happened at her school, it is the only school in the country it happened in. Nowhere else are GCSE predictions made on EFYS, KSI SATs or anything else that happens in primary school. KS2 SATs might have an impact on Year 7 sets, but even then, secondary schools generally test and reset after the fist year. And any school which did follow pug's ideas would fail it's OFSTED. And would have done under the old framework as well.

Well, since you don't want it to be based on tests (because it might be the wrong level of test... even though the test is matched to how the child performs in class) and you don't want it based on what your child does in class (which is what teacher assessment is based on), would you prefer not to know how your child is doing???

I am genuinely sorry that your DD's first school had a poor head and wasn't great for her, and thus she didn't perform well in class, but to condemn an entire system rather than be prepared simply to say 'my DD had a poor experience in one school once' is irrational....

To get back to my original point, state systems (excluding grammar systems) lack the competitive atmosphere to allow kids like my dd to thrive - IN MY OPINION. All this continuous assessment & different tables being given different work (in dd's old school anyway) means that kids like dd don't even bother trying in class because there is no reward. All the certificates given in assembly for good behaviour (because x managed not to have a fight this week) or attendance just make some kids switch off to learning.

Blimey pugs! I'm glad I don't teach your DC. I don't think I could cope with Parents' Meetings :)

In which case I hope it is not based on teacher assessment anymore.