Concerned schools will just reteach material from March 2020

[notevenat20]

I have become worried that schools will decide they need to reteach all the material from March 2020 onwards when they go back in September. For the many families like ours who worked their socks off trying to provide decent home schooling in the lockdown, this would be a kick in the teeth.

Do you think this is going to happen?

Third, the SATs aren't designed to test the most able children.

How many children each year in your school get a full set of full marks?

Maybe 6 calendar months, but take out the holidays (easter, half term and summer) and take out the non quality teaching time (plays, sports, competitions, day trips, supply teachers, video watching, inset days, etc), and you come down to just a few missed "quality" teaching weeks.

If you do that for the whole calendar year what do you end up with?

@notevenat20
Please read my previous post about the SATs and their function with higher-attaining children and consider my offer to feedback to you on the data level analysis of your child's school.

How many children each year in your school get a full set of full marks?

I did once look at a graph for the year 2 SAT papers and the number was pretty high. (Someone had managed to get results from a few hundred schools.) For year 6 my guess is that the more able children could get something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6. Certainly not so far off full marks that an SM alarm bell would be rung. (Who would ring the bell if the governors are not interested?)

@Iamnotthe1 I have given up on that school now so it's all in the past but thanks nonetheless.

Third, the SATs aren't designed to test the most able children.

Just coming back to this point - what is your specific evidence base for this?

Do you mean 'they don't ask questions that test the understanding of the KS2 curriculum that challenge the most able children' or 'they don't test material that is outside the KS2 curriculum that the most able children could grasp if they are taught it'?

I do also think there is a difference between 'questions that a child could answer outside a test situation, without time pressure' and 'questions that are challenging in a time pressured scenario'.

Do you mean 'they don't ask questions that test the understanding of the KS2 curriculum that challenge the most able children' or 'they don't test material that is outside the KS2 curriculum that the most able children could grasp if they are taught it'?

That's a nice question. I think I mean both. A number of children of friends got 100% in the year 2 SATs. They are not all geniuses. And actually you can see it from the graph of results. The x-axis is the percentage mark. The graph goes up, then down and then sharply up when you get towards 100%. This says to me that it is testing one subset of the population well but not another. It would be great to see a similar graph for year 6 sats.

@notevenat20

How many children each year in your school get a full set of full marks?

I did once look at a graph for the year 2 SAT papers and the number was pretty high. (Someone had managed to get results from a few hundred schools.) For year 6 my guess is that the more able children could get something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6. Certainly not so far off full marks that an SM alarm bell would be rung. (Who would ring the bell if the governors are not interested?)

Ah, I don't think you understand how the data is used. The question is not 'how many children achieve nearly full marks' (and I speak as someone who teaches in a school where full marks across 1 or 2 subjects are attained by several children every year, though across 3 is rarer), but 'how much progress has every child made from their starting point'.

When I say SATs, I mean Y6 - Y2 SATs are different, rightly, because of the age of the children.

Just because you can't see your child being stretched or your child doesn't think they're being stretched, doesn't mean it's not happening.

Ensuring that the most able are challenged is one of the hardest parts of teaching a mixed ability class. I know my most able mathematician thinks she isn't challenged in class, but when ofsted came they saw her book and commented on the good level of challenge. But it's not easy to do and I don't get it right every lesson. It's probably harder to do than differentiating for my least able pupils.

(I know this isn't what OP was about, but your later posts show you clearly have more than one issue)

@notevenat20
For year 6 my guess is that the more able children could get something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6.

Definitely not.
I'm being potentially outing here but I am the Year Six teacher a school which, for the last four years, has been one of the highest performing primary schools in the country. It is rare to have a child who gets full marks across the board, rarer still to have one who can do that at an earlier point in yhe year and it definitely doesn't happen if they haven't been challenged or stretched properly.

Regarding Year Two SATs, the scores there are to inform as internal data only. The official data for the children in Year Two takes the form of teacher assessment. Not even FFT have the Year Two SATs scores from hundreds of primary schools.

Ah, I don't think you understand how the data is used.

Sorry I was answering a specific question about how often children get full marks. I do know about progress measures.

It is rare to have a child who gets full marks across the board, rarer still to have one who can do that at an earlier point in the year

We are slightly crossed-purposes. I was referring to "something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6. Certainly not so far off full marks that an SM alarm bell would be rung. "

Not even FFT have the Year Two SATs scores from hundreds of primary schools.

Right, they went around schools asking for the data. That's why they had hundreds and not thousands.

@notevenat20

Maybe 6 calendar months, but take out the holidays (easter, half term and summer) and take out the non quality teaching time (plays, sports, competitions, day trips, supply teachers, video watching, inset days, etc), and you come down to just a few missed "quality" teaching weeks.

If you do that for the whole calendar year what do you end up with?

A calendar year has 39 teaching weeks. When schools were instructed to close to the majority of pupils there were 13 weeks of the school year remaining. So 1/3 of potential teaching time. As others have said the last couple of weeks of the summer term do not generally contain much content due to sports day, trips, etc. Also end if year exams which take up a week or so. So in a secondary school about 1/4 of the teaching year was missed. I'd imagine in primary it was less than that in reality as there tend to be more fun but educational activities such as school plays and concerts that take up more time and are used to embed teaching from earlier in the year.

What do you suggest they do? Some kids won't have picked up a pen since March or even glanced at a book. Teachers will try to ensure they stretch those able to as much as possible but they have to ensure every kid in that class covered last years curriculum. Remember not all children have access to the internet etc.

@notevenat20

Ah, I don't think you understand how the data is used.

Sorry I was answering a specific question about how often children get full marks. I do know about progress measures.

It is rare to have a child who gets full marks across the board, rarer still to have one who can do that at an earlier point in the year

We are slightly crossed-purposes. I was referring to "something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6. Certainly not so far off full marks that an SM alarm bell would be rung. "

Not even FFT have the Year Two SATs scores from hundreds of primary schools.

Right, they went around schools asking for the data. That's why they had hundreds and not thousands.

I'm teaching Year 6. We know that in the year group (60 chn) there are 2 children likely are already able to get GDS in their SATs. So, if we were game-playing, we could ignore them all year without affecting our data (we won't, obviously, but if we were awful teachers we could).

However, this would give us less than 2% at greater depth, which would be a concern. So we need to teach the 15 or so with potential for greater depth really well, to raise that to about 27%. So if we only taught to the "median and below," we would be in trouble.

I get that other schools might have a higher proportion of "already able to do it" kids, but I doubt if many have 27+%. Have you seen Year 6 SATs papers? They really aren't easy.

I think that if you are saying 'Year 2 SATs tests do not challenge the most able', then you need to be clear - as iamnotthe1 says, the official reported level for Y2 SATs is teacher assessment, and so the tests have a fundamentally different role from the Y6 SATs.

Y6 SATs do challenge the most able. What you are saying seems to be 'some children could get a good proportion of the marks if they did a paper earlier primary' ... well, yes, if you think of A-levels or GCSEs, when children take mocks using the full papers, they get a good proportion of the marks, just not the very high marks that they might need to get an A or 9 in the actual exam. Do we say that the fact a child might get marks equivalent to a B in a mock means that the paper doesn't challenge the most able - no, because for those most able, the challenge is getting from the B to the A.

Op your lucky, we were told to collect learning packs. I got all excited and found an empty exercise book and their maths book. Which was way too advanced for my dd needs!
That was our learning pack, along with pointers to websites like twinkl and bite size, but no actual guidance on what to do within those websites.

It was grueling initially as I was working but in the end, by referring to year 2 sats papers I then found the stuff to teach what's in them.

My dd seemingly had no knowledge of anything at all at lock down. The only thing she could remember was comma in a list and the space race.
I've had to start from ground zero. So I'll be super happy if they go back over what I've taught her and reinforce it. And, make dd feel confident that she knows something for a change!!
With tricky maths and grammar concepts, I don't think it harms them to have a good grounding in it.

What concerns me however is that they announced that with the batch of work they flooded us with, 3 weeks before summer... That all the curriculum had been covered!!

Op, be it bright child or struggling child, I don't trust our school. A parent can't take their eye off the ball. I know there are thousands of amazing teachers out there. But perhaps it's the ethos of the head, I don't know... Perhaps state education just can't work except for a small few, but I've lost all trust in it and will be going forward relying on myself and 2 tutors. Then school will hopefully re in force what we have taught, because they can't seem to actually teach my dd.

@notevenat20

Ah, I don't think you understand how the data is used.

Sorry I was answering a specific question about how often children get full marks. I do know about progress measures.

It is rare to have a child who gets full marks across the board, rarer still to have one who can do that at an earlier point in the year

We are slightly crossed-purposes. I was referring to "something nearish to full marks a long time before the end of year 6. Certainly not so far off full marks that an SM alarm bell would be rung. "

Not even FFT have the Year Two SATs scores from hundreds of primary schools.

Right, they went around schools asking for the data. That's why they had hundreds and not thousands.

Even with that adjustment, it remains rare, particularly if you are looking at all subjects but even in just one.

In addition, the progress measure is actually the important one here. Even children being awarded greater depth at Year Two in all subjects (or Level 3 as it would have been for many of the recent Year Six cohorts) would not be predicted to full marks in their KS2 tests. The FFT predictive measure would set their 'expected progress' as ending in a score around 113-114. Scores higher than that show more than expected progress. If schools weren't meeting the needs of their higher-attaining pupils, those high attainment scores and high progress scores for previously high-attainers wouldn't exist.

With regards to the collated Year Two data, who are 'they' and do you have a copy or link to that data? It would represent the largest gathering of KS1 scores in a long time so I'd be very interested to analyse it.

Doesn't it depend on the topic/subject/level though? In a subject like Maths or science or MFL, then it's a fundamental requirement to have strong foundations before moving up to higher level/more complicated topics. For those "building block" subjects, I think it's essential for schools to start back where they left off.

For other subjects, such as humanities, English, etc., I think there's more scope to "forget" topics that were stand alone, one off, etc that later topics/modules etc don't depend on quite so fundamentally. (Obviously not in cases where required for GCSE/A level exams!). But, say, in a non exam year, if the class was going to do a project on, say, Ancient Egypt, or a particular piece of literature, or even in science/geography, a topic not inc in an exam such as rocks, etc., then it can simply be left out and forgotten for that cohort.

There is no "one size fits all". Dfiferent cohorts, different subjects, etc will have different needs. We really have to rely on teacher judgments as no one else can know what's best. The last thing we want is "top down" instructions from an incompetent quango similar to what Ofqual did with the grading!!

@solidaritea
I get that other schools might have a higher proportion of "already able to do it" kids, but I doubt if many have 27+%. Have you seen Year 6 SATs papers? They really aren't easy.

We get a really high percentage of children reaching greater depth in the tests and we still only start with one or two who just make it over the boundry for 110 in our first assessments in October. These children don't occur naturally: they have been challenge both at school and at home.

As @solidaritea said, if a school didn't challenge then they would end up with a tiny percentage reaching greater depth and this would flag with the local authority, the MAT board and with Ofsted.

In our school, lots of tutoring goes on, for 11+ but also very much like what I've been pushed too, to make up for massive teaching gaps.
It's a middle class school in a leafy area and the dp are very samey. Take that school and put it somewhere dp can't afford to plug gaps, I'm sure it would be in special measures.
All the dc who are struggling in our class have tutors. We've all been desperately trying to find out whats going on with our dc. And failing.
So we've had to take matters into our own hands. And outsource and pay. Dd is lucky. I wouldn't have been able to afford this help a few years ago.

Oh and tutor and 11+are very dirty words in our school. The teachers have no idea at all about the massive amount of tutoring. Nor is parental in put valued much.

Ie the school and teachers think it really is solely their amazingness!!

(sorry for multiple posts)

We will start back up where we stopped in March, otherwise those who’s families couldn’t help would be totally disadvantaged.

Swelteringmeltering Ugh, that's terrible.

To be honest what I actually did is search the websites of schools in England until I found one that had decent material online. I then used that to home school with. DCs school contributed exactly nothing to the home schooling.