He is at the wrong reading level, how do I approach this?

[Afairread]

He is in year 4 and has not gone up a reading level for over a year. We have continued to read as normal, detailing all our reading to the teachers in our reading journal. At parents evening the teacher agreed to increase the level, but changed her mind the very next day at school. My child's self esteem and confidence is suffering and I have made the teacher aware of this. The gap is over three levels so too significant to ignore,
The teacher used the word inference, but I have done extra work with my child to explore this, and I don't agree and his comprehension results surely would disprove this in class. Why have no previous teachers had any issues with his reading? He normally gets full marks on his spelling test each week but now is made to feel like he is failing at school.
Any suggestions as to the best approach with the school? Exasperated😓 parent!

@Afairread what reading scheme is he on, because there are lots.

The Accelerated Reader scheme tests a child's ability to answer questions about books and they can have their book open next to them to refer back. It is a test of their comprehension skills. As someone who listened to children read in school I had a list of questions to ask children about their books so that they could demonstrate their comprehension of the book. Some books are 28 pages but depending where some children are on the scheme some are 300 pages so it is a long time before they are tested on the book but they are listened to every week.

Questions you might ask, can you tell me what has happened so far in the book, this chapter etc? What do you think <character> is feeling? Why do you think he feels like that? What do you think could happen next? What does this word mean? Can you think of a synonym/antonym for it? You need to explore the book he is reading.

We had children in school on one book level but at home they were reading at a higher level. It isn't about ability to read but ability to understand what they are reading. ie in Harry Potter book 1 you are told Neville lives with his Grandparents. Lots of younger children just accept this but never immediately question why a child lives with their Grandparents, what could have happened for that to take place? Or initially before it is explained why Ron sees something different to Harry in the mirror of Erised. Or that there is a lot of word play in Harry Potter. Diagon Alley/Diagonally, backwards words etc.

Reading doesn't always have to be your child reading to you, you can also read to your child and then ask questions. The more you discuss books and the contents the more children pick up on the type of questions they should be asking themselves when they read.

I had this with my eldest, he was reading books you'd expect a 6 year old to read all through Year 4 while reading himself chapter books at home.

I spoke to his teacher, who told me it was because when he read out loud he didn't always put the emphasis on the right words.

I said I'd work with him on his emphasis, but couldn't he also read more challenging books while we did that? She said no.

After starting Year 5, he quickly moved up reading levels and now gets to choose whichever books he likes from the top groups as he can't move higher.

Just ignore the level at school and get them to read the school books to you along with more appropriate books at home.

We had something like this too.

You couldn’t move up a level until you had been formally assessed by a TA and that only happened once every term, and was effectively a memory test. You were asked fact based questions about the book and if you couldn’t remember the answers (looking them up in the book was ironically not allowed) you had to stay at that level for another term.
My child was bored stiff by the terrible reading scheme, at a level way too low for him, and started “losing” his books so he couldn’t participate in weekly reading checks. It took the teacher six weeks to even notice that nobody had been hearing him read at school, and another two to contact me. So OP, I can see why your child might not have changed level for a year.
My child was already an avid reader by this stage and I was pretty disgusted that this school seemed to be succeeding in putting him off reading. This was a school that was supposed to be one of the best primaries in London! I even offered to buy the school’s choice of new reading scheme (as staff and children universally hated the current one) but the head wouldn’t let me.
Ultimately for us the answer was moving school.