To think DD's school report is meaningless?

[Twowrongsdontmakearight]

Got DD's 'dashboard' for the end of term. Rather than levels the school are using A (above expected progress) E (expected progress) and B (below). DD has entirely Es.

So, she is progressing as expected. But from that we can't tell which subjects she's good at - "she's brilliant at this subject and is doing really well which is just what we expected" OR "well she really struggles but is trying hard and making slow progress as is expected".

AIBU to think this is a bit lazy on the part of the school and is a pointless exercise as it tell us nothing?

If the reports don't provide the parents with useful and actionable information, they are pointless.

This is why teachers are leaving the profession in droves - they are not allowed to get on and do their job and have moe and more pointless paperwork piled on their heads on an annual basis.

It's a desperate situation.

Oh and Bobo, if teachers were allowed to be honest I guarantee a large number of parents would be up in arms - they only want to be told the truth if it's positive sadly.

Sadly, I am sure you are right, StitchingMoss.

Dds report confused me.

It's not letter grades it's number graded, something to do with GCSEs being numbered when she does them. So we get a predicted number grade that they are aiming at for GCSEs.

They also et an effort grade E1 being top and E6 being awful.

They admitted the Predicted GCSE is a complete guess as they have no benchmark and (when we had got the last report) dd had only been at that school 6 weeks. Due to all the kids settling in it was difficult to tell.

I just looked at her effort grades, they call the parents in at the end of each half term if there are concerns. She got E1 mainly so I was good with that.

Have to wait and see what this one brings.

I recently got DS first data capture - he's just started secondary.

They use numbers. The numbers relate to the numbers they'll be awareded with at GCSE but aren't entirely correspondent iyswim?
Ds is predicted the same GCSE result for all subjects based on his average point score for KS 2 sats. All very well but for the child who is working at entirely different levels in maths and English, has a SpLD, and is in top 10% country for some cognitive tests and bottom 20% for verbal reasoning - he is always going to be below expected level for all subjects other than maths, ICT and science and always above in maths as that is the subject that pulls his whole overall target up beyond his reach.

And yes yes to it being cracking a code! I spent about 15 minutes trying to work out what the numbers meant from the explanation letter sent and about 15 seconds reading DS actual results!

I try to be positive in my reports, but still mention negatives. The pupil will read them so you want them to be motivating as, ultimately, we want all children to succeed.

My most negative reports are on these lines:

You have a lot of potential in X, Bob, and you have shown that, when focused, you can make progress. However, you must stop allowing yourself to get distracted by others.

Ds1 is 12 and his academy have kept the old grading system meaning we can see his progress from last year, and where he is excelling.

They also have a minimum grade which they need to achieve to take the subject in year 9. They choose their options this year in year 8.

Ds2 is still in primary and I am dreading working out whether he has progressed as he is above expected levels for his year, so if I get another above expected I can't interpret anything from that. His entire Maths group is massively ahead, ie at least 2 years.

stitching I disagree with that. I'm having a battle with DS school who have withdrawn the literacy support he got in juniors and believe they are inflating his grade just to shut me up. I want the honest truth and exact whereabouts. You cannot trust a school who informs you that the child who had full time 1:1 and scribe in literacy suddenly 3 weeks into secondary was a literary genius and has made the equivilent of 2 sublevels progress unsupported in English. I have seen his work as he has a laptop!
They also scored his literacy level at the lowest possible so it's clear to me this is holding him back as literacy ability is needed across the curriculum to communicate knowledge effectively.
Not everyone is going to be top of the class - therefore a realistic overview will help me and him know what to work on and plan his future decisions.

Another slow handclap for the Tory government and their education policy.

Sukkii25 Social Justice and Inclusion just happens to be the part of the teaching Standards for Registration where individual educational needs (among many other issues) are addressed directly. I you look at the Standards as a whole you will see that throughout the focus is on all pupils and their learning.

www.gtcs.org.uk/web/FILES/the-standards/standards-for-registration-1212.pdf

Your daughter will find that teachers must ensure that all children, whatever their level of development, must show appropriate progress.

She will also discover that cuts to PSA staffing means that individual support has to be assigned to the most hard pressed pupils.

In any case, the best thing a teacher can do for an able pupil (or indeed any pupil) is develop their skills as an independent learner.

Our equivalent of the dashboard gives a level for the child's individual commitment and an indication of where children are relative to the average for their age and stage. It is a tracking tool which is a distillation of formal and informal assessment. I suspect it is more useful to the school and teacher than it is to parents because it means sitting down with your head teacher twice a year to discuss your class, child by child.

I still have my school report from primary school in the 1960s. It consist of a grade and a single word, such as "B+, Good" for an entire term's work in a subject.

The only detail was regarding my behaviour, which was generally poor, and full of complaints that I was "over-confident". Damned with faint praise indeed.

For EYFS, they use the '3 E's' don't they?
Emerging, Expected and Exceeding.

Every teacher I have spoken to hates this new system but it has been forced upon them by senior leadership teams after a serious lack of guidance from the government. So you scrap national curriculum levels but put nothing in their place to use nationally? Each school is doing something different? Great idea! Current Y10 and 11 data should be fairly accurate as they will be taking the GCSEs as they stand currently so teachers know what the standards are and how likely students are to meet them. They have past papers and mark schemes to help them make these decisions.

How on earth they can make a reliable judgement on the progress towards target of students in Y7-9 is beyond me as they don't know exactly what the new GCSEs look like or what the standards are for each grade boundary. It is utterly, utterly ridiculous! I understand the frustration of parents as they are the same frustrations shared by teachers because they can see how demotivating and damaging these new style of reports are to the students. Direct your frustration at the leaders of the school, not at the teachers in the classroom as their hands are really tied and there's not much they can do about the new system. The more parents who start voicing their opinions to senior leaders about the new system, the better. It is a pointless, waste of time which is demotivating and needs a massive rethink on a national scale.

It is just horrendous and utterly meaningless. I'm a teacher and don't fully understand the ridiculously complicated conversion tables from gcse grades to numbers, currently working at and expected final grades for our year nines.

It is a desperately shattered system at present. The govt basically binned NC levels and ordered that schools make it all about ARE (age related expectations) but didn't give any kind of standardised system hence the whole thing is all over the place with different descriptors in different schools. Some do the 3 Es as mentioned above, some do as the OP described, some do developing, secure, mastery. To me it's a huge step down from the levels as parents no longer know exactly where their child is, only that they are achieving at a secure level or whatever. There is less tangible information now. Teachers are unhappy about it but have to do it, and it just generates page after page of indecipherable data.

As for secondary, it depends on the school. Ours are still using sub levels in some subjects and new GCSE numbers in others which makes for confusing reading as it's easy to confuse one with the other - for eg, dd is achieving a 6 in one subject which means a B in old style grade, then still described as achieving 7c in another which is the old sublevel thing and nothing to do with the new grade. It's all a bit of a mess and leaves parents reeling.

The govt needs to produce a centralised understood system which parents can grasp and which describes exactly where the child is. Oh wait, they did, and then they scrapped it.....

Our school has just switched to this system as well, and I didn't really find it helpful. I Just got those sort of levels for my DDs (yes 7 and 8). Last year, we got a level (6a etc) and were also told the range of levels across the year, so I could see where DD1 fitted it. This year I've got a number from 1 to 4 for progress, and a number from 1 to 4 for effort. But for DD2 in year 7, I've no idea what her expected level is, just that she is either making expected progress or above expected progress.

The reason the government gave for scrapping national curriculum levels was that parents didn't understand them.

Levels were badly misused, sub levels were complete nonsense and the idea that progress should be linear and that students should progress neatly in sublevels with every report was rubbish.

But is this really better?

my DS1 is in year 10 and has predicted GCSE grades. For maths and english these are numbers 1-9, for the rest letters.

DD is year 8 and she gets subgrades 6a, 7b etc. which vary massively from one subject to the next.

DS2 is year 5 (different school) and is graded at a 'level' with a letter which stands for Emerging, Developing, Secure and Ready (for the next level, I presume). I have no idea what the levels are, only that they are not the same as the ones that DD gets.

The predicted GCSE grades are useful, the rest is baffling :(

Our headmaster called all the parents in and told us without telling us they are not at all fans of the new system. There isn't even consistency between local feeder primary schools so no wonder secondaries are struggling. A legacy of Gove thinking education is all about assessments.
Sooner it goes full circle and levels come back the happier everyone will be! Do you have the opportunity to go in & see you child's teacher OP? Have to say ours have been fab at giving us a more realistic level within these generic meeting,exceeding, mastering assessment grades.

I used to get a grade sheet each half term. Our work was marked out of 10, so we'd get an average out of 10 and the average of the class was provided too so eg I might get an average of 8/10 for History and the class average was 7, and for Maths it was the other way round. Alongside that they gave an effort mark, x for not trying, tick for great effort, o for doing ok. I thought it worked quite well. And then we got a written report once a year as well.

My son is on a kind of flightpath thing with numbers. He came in from KS2 with high level 5s so is supposed to get 7/8s in the new-style GCSEs. He had "expected" for most subjects so I assume he's on track to get the 7s or 8s. My son's school doesn't actually explain it very well but the other secondary school in our town is using the same method and has a lot more examples so I understand it much better from their website!

It's crap for children who are not academic due to SEN.

My DS is in a special school now and his report is really target focuses and tells me what he has achieved and what he is still working towards.

In a mainstream school I'd just be told he was B (Below Standard) which would tell me nothing.

Hooray for special schools....not enough of them out there for the children who need them.

I'm a teacher and I absolutely hate the fact we're told not to use levels anymore. We have nothing to replace them with! No targets to say if they are on track or not, no way of saying where a child is or comparing them for setting etc. Its basically a massive backward step in education. The school will now be guessing if they are making expected progress or not as they have no targets, nothing to aim for.

The head of Y7 at dds school had to spend a whole morning ringing parents trying to explain the reports. My DD was on red for English ( underachieving) because of her sat grade. But the English teacher said she is doing brilliantly and is one the best in her class. Why can't I just have an old fashioned report with a few comments like that, rather than a bizarre graph that left my daughter in tears ( and took up a lot of teachers time sorting the mess)blame the government or SLT's interpretation of government policy rather than the teachers.