Year 7 target GCSE grades

My DD and DE have this on the bottom of the reports. It's based on SATS for them and predicted scores if they stay at the same level. They will always move up and down it's just a guide :)

That's roughly the same as my sons SATs scores (105 spag, 109 maths and reading) and he achieved all 4s and 5s in his GCSEs. Obviously with hard work, yours could do better.

The target grades will not influence the final gcse predicted grades. And your child has a lot of years of school left to improve. I have a y12 who got put in the bottom set for maths in Y7. But they ended up getting a 9 in GCSE maths. So don’t worry about it just yet.

DDs school has only just let us have predicted and target gcse grades. She's in year 11 ...

My son was "greater depth" in all of his SATs but his secondary school told me his targets were 5/6. This was in year 7. He did his GCSEs last summer and all were grade 7+.
Frankly I'd take what they are saying at the beginning of year 7 with a huge pinch of salt.

Er nope. Kid was just very weak. Clearly something had gone a bit wrong at Primary stage (
confused him with another child, perhaps? 🤣)

Maybe he has a huge potential and is doing very well in the classroom. Just not that effective at homework. MIne is like that. It takes him hours and hours to do homework. Because most of that time he is not doing it.lol

I'm dreading DD2s first report as she did really well in her SATs and I'm worried her target grade will appear terrifying and unreachable.

We had exactly this with my DD. Her KS3 reports all came back peppered with "working below expectations" despite her doing really excellently. In one subject she'd actually got 100% in everything apart from 1 assessment where she'd dropped 2 marks. It turned out that it was impossible to be "working at expectations" in some subjects because the teachers wouldn't commit to high grades at GCSE when DD was so far off.

Result was one extremely demoralised child, the school refused to see our point and wouldn't change the way they did reports, so we told DD to ignore the targets and just focused on attainment and effort.

For OP- it can be useful to not have stellar targets :)

As parents, we want to see the statistics showing a school has good results and good progress scores...

But we don't want our children to be seen as data points.

I know that my DD hates seeing the report on how far "behind" her English scores are... based on a target inflated by her Maths score (similarly, she appears to over achieve in Maths and Science...)
I'm dreading DD2s first report as she did really well in her SATs and I'm worried her target grade will appear terrifying and unreachable. She's smart... but has perfectionist tendencies so if the stats say she's supposed to get 8s, she will obsess about not getting 8s.

It would be so much easier without this constant data.

Its all bollocks. They are based on sat scores and bare little relevance to actual gcse results but are a stick to beat teachers with sadly

I’ve honestly no idea how they came up with this poor kid’s target - I began to suspect someone had written his SATS for him. My HOD (she was new) was outrageous, though, repeatedly demanding that his coursework had to be an A (it was expected to be one grade above the target) when everyone in the school, including the child, knew that would never happen unless I wrote it for him!

I feel your pain OP. DD was given very low target grades (Fisher Family something) - she didn't do SATs and did badly in the CAT test, so low that I never told her. Consequently the difference between her target grades and what she actually achieved at the end of year 10 is in some cases quite large. We have to put down her predicted grades on her 6th form application and the teachers have advised putting her mock results down, as everything just seems to be a nonsense.

Honestly OP take them with a pinch of salt. Giving GCSE target grades in Y7 is absolutely ridiculous and very inaccurate - a lot changes between age 11 & 16!

For perspective, quite a few of the bottom set in DD’s Y7 year group have gone on to do
prestigious and competitive degrees like medicine and law, a few even went to Oxbridge. Equally I know of a surprisingly large amount of high flyers who crashed and burned - unfortunately DD included!

Exactly. Statistical only at this age. Take it with a massive pinch of salt. At an individual level children can make massive leaps.

It's a statistical forecast, thousands and thousands of kids re tracked by baseline tests.

they review predicted grade every term from year 9. I didn't say that they change it every term. They change only if there was a consistent change for several terms. For some children it never changes.

To give an idea of the calculations, they're based upon the average of just KS2 Reading and Maths - children of the same sex born around the same month with that score will have an expected level of progress, a higher and a very high, which is the mean grade of all exams they could be expected to sit, based upon all the other children who have had their progress measured over the last x years.

It's a broad brush that doesn't allow for illness, disability, ESOL, finding a spectacular level of ability at one particular thing, etc, because it is basically calculating the odds based upon the previous performance of thousands and thousands of children. So it's broadly accurate, but not down to the specific child.

This year and next, they're offering estimates based upon the standardised average CAT4 scores and IIRC, KS1 data where the school wants it included. It'll be interesting to see whether it's more accurate, as the Mean SAS takes into account verbal and non verbal, quantitative and spatial reasoning, compared to just Reading and Maths.

the target is always one grade up. My son is Set 2 ( out of 6) in first term at English and target is 8-9 at GCSE In Maths he is set 1 and target is also 8-9. Don't ask me why....but this is only year 7 first assessment + SATs results.

A target and a predicted grade aren't the same thing. It doesn't make any sense to change targets every term. Changing predicted grades makes more sense as they could have worked really hard or fallen behind.

Predicting grades from Y9 is a bit early though, they're going to be pretty finger in the air.

My last school didn’t either. I distinctly remember banging my head against a brick wall with the HOD cos a kid with a target of a B had coursework at a C. He was a solid D kid. The coursework had to be an A, apparently. The kid knew he wasn’t capable, I knew he wasn’t capable. It was ridiculous and upsetting all round!

The school say they don’t change the targets during the 5 years

That doesn't make sense. In our school they review targets every year and from y 9 every term

Ignore! My boy had the same. He got 8s and 9s and 3 As at alevel (tjis year). We focussed on effort and self belief.
Honestly think predicted grades at this age is supremely unhelpful.

Only on average! These kinds of statistics and targets were designed to be applicable at a population level. As such, they are barely reliable as a way to predict or judge individual schools' performance, never mind individual students' performance.

Unfortunately, if measurement methods are created (however inaccurate, irrelevant or spurious), governments will use them as a stick, so schools will be forced to make what is measurable their priority, and will allow that to dictate how they predict, target-set and report. However, that doesn't stop good teachers from trying to get the best out of all their students, regardless of their targets!

Make sure you are clear on the difference between target and predicted grades. Your OP seems to put them both together.

Targets, as has been said, are a calculation based on SATs scores and normal progress. I think it is important to let parents know this is where the child is approximately at based on SATs scores so there are no big surprises at the start of year 11. They will not change throughout year 7-11 and are out of the school’s control. The student could, at any point, be performing way above or below target.

Predicted grades are based on whatever the school decides to base them on and shared with parents whenever the school chooses to in whatever format they think is best. They should change, and will get more accurate as the student approaches the end of year 11. These are the ones you should pay attention to if you want to know how they’re doing.