To wonder why so many intelligent parents...

[FallenCaryatid]

Are still completely confused about reporting levels.
They've been around for years, they are searchable on an enormous number of websites, your older KS2 children are using them as targets, schools have curriculum evenings about them, many schools glue the levels into books as success criteria for children to use to self-assess and yet every year it's the same kerfuffle of parents wondering if a 3a is better than a 3c and is it OK for little Jocasta who is in Y1 to be a 3a for maths.
Every...year.

Can someday explain to me what they find so difficult about it?

That to hit a level there's a whole lot of boxes to tick. And these change from subject to subject - I used to teach science and for every topic there are tens of statements to check. That's from the teachers' POV.

From the parents' POV, the idea of levels isn't intuitive - what DO the levels MEAN (they don't correspond with KS level, they don't lead anywhere i.e. we all know A is the top and E/F is around the bottom)

So if I post something like this and everybody reads it, nobody will have any more problems?

I would say I am fairly intelligent and so is dh but I have no interest in what my kids levels are. I look at the effort grade, and as long as they are trying hard, interested and enjoying school, I have every confidence that they will be the best that they can be. I don't give a shiny shite what level that is, only that they have done their best with the brains they have. I'm
Lucky that they are both in small classes with excellent tuition though.

As someone just said, the attainment isn't the same for MFL. Plus, when I taught science, average kids were only just hitting L5 at end of KS3. And as parents say here, they aren't interested in comparing across years, they want a scale between peers.

In France they give marks out of twenty at the end of each year. They are given for each topic and you are given the class average and the year average. I feel this is more informative than levels and shows progress just as well.

I don't think that is difficult to understand at all. And it puts me right about the a,b,c, ( I got it a bit wrong in an earlier post but knew it was something like that!)

I think that sums it up nicely.

Lebfg
Ds1s school does similar and it gives the same info in a much clearer way.

Senior school does upper and lower rather than a,b,c

However I haven't the faintest idea if
7 means an exactly average level 7 (as in 7L, 7, 7U) or it simply means, the teacher can't be bothered with sub levels.
I know the maths mistress doesn't like them.

I sort of agree with the OP - it's easy enough to google this stuff - but I also think the levels are needlessly confusing and, worse, to some extent meaningless. You get obsessed with them and then realise it's pointless.

One of the confusing things is that the number bit of it starts at 1 and goes up 2, 3, etc. But the lettering goes the other way, so that a is higher than c.

And they don't seem to progress in an orderly fashion either, iywswim. So when children do SATs in year 2, the average is something like 2b, while the highest score will usually be 3a. But then over the next four years, they only progress a couple of levels, so that the average child in year 6 will be on 4b, and the brighter kids on at most 5a.

It's equally confusing when your child gets to secondary. If you go to the directgov explanation of how this works, the average 14-year old is supposed to be getting something like 5a/6c. Yet there'll be plenty of kids already at 5a level in year 6. Is there really such a gap between "bright" and "average" that the average 14-year old is achieving the same as the brighter 11 year olds?

Furthermore, most parents find that their kids drop a couple of sub-levels in their first year at secondary school because the primary school has been artificially pumping up the grades to look good in league tables. So if you took any notice of this stuff, you could get terribly anxious about it.

jamdonut don't apologise! It's very helpful and reassuring to read what you have written. The teachers in the new subjects say my DS1 is doing well but it is hard to believe he really is when he is just getting level 4s and you've no idea what the other children are getting.

Anyone with any real intelligence knows levels are a pike of subjective shit and of parents knew how often teachers guessed them they'd not take them so seriously.

"Furthermore, most parents find that their kids drop a couple of sub-levels in their first year at secondary school because the primary school has been artificially pumping up the grades to look good in league tables."

This is occasionally true. However it is more likely to be:
Year 7 contains a huge amount of social learning. They spend their time trying to fit in, find their way round, get on with new teachers, deal with new ways of doing things, managing homework, getting the bus, etc etc. They will naturally slow down in academic learning.
Year 7 maths, english, whatever, is obviously harder than year 6. In the same way some children will get a 5c in the year 5 SATs and only a 4a or 4b in the year 6 ones because they are testing a year lower of the curriculum.

I completely agree that the transition to secondary school levels makes no sense. The levels are meaningless.