Can someone help me with understanding standardised scores?

[MrsFogi]

We get these each year at my ds' school but I'm unsure what story they tell me year on year. Should I be expecting to see an improvement each year in his standardised score (and equally should I be worried if I see a big drop)?
I posted this in the primary education topic but have just realised I may be more likely to find a teacher on this topic .

I'm not a teacher and not an expert but our school give SAS scores in Y4 & 5. I think the reason they do it is so you can see if it's worth considering 11+ for your child (we live in a selective county)

Certainly we are given a guideline of score required to pass 11+ but also told that these scores may well improve over time. Our experience bore this out, with DSs scores for Y5 way higher than Y4, and his 11+ scores were higher than his Y5 score.

If your child is making the expected level of progress for a child of his age his standardised score will remain roughly the same. Standardised scores fall within a range e.g. if your child has a standardised score of 98 he may have scored (for example) within the range of 94 - 102 so a score falling within that range the following year should be okay.

If there's a pattern of falling or rising scores across the assessment process it might be considered differently. You need to look at the whole picture.
For example, If you child has been receiving intervention you might expect the score in that area to increase.

A big drop might be a worry depending on how big the drop is, where it is and whether your child has fallen into the below average range.

Average scores are roughly 85 - 115 although a score of 85-90 would be considered to be a low average and 110-115 a high average.

Below 85 is below average. Above 115 above average.

There's a detailed discussion at

www.nfer.ac.uk/research/centre-for-assessment/standardised-scores-and-percentile-ranks.cfm

Basically it's normalized so that kid's ages are taken into account, and then the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. But the graph and table on the web site are much more communicative. We always asked in advance for this type of data to be provided at parents' evenings. We found NC levels weird, teacher assessments could be inconsistent if helpful, raw marks all over the place, and schools these days refuse to tell you your kid's place in the class. The std scores at least tell you how your kid is doing compared to national standards. It's well worth learning what they mean and asking for them. If you have a bright kid it is particularly helpful because they can be useful in making sure the school deploys the right G&T resources.