Year 6 levels downgraded due to moderator review

[Cadmum22]

Hi,

My daughter is in year 6. Her attainment levels throughout primary school year on year for reading and writing have been ‘exceeding expected levels’.

She passed the kent test with a score of 360. Maths 112 English 126 Reasoning 122.

Her year end 5 CAT scores were Verbal 116 Quantative 118 Non verbal 132.

i do not yet have her SATS scores.

i received a call from her teacher today to say that they had used her writing work as a sample for moderators and they have downgraded her from ‘exceeding expected levels’ to ‘attained national average’. He said they appealed the decision as they could not believe it but the appeal was overruled and that’s that she will be downgraded. He was unsure if her secondary school will be informed.

My question is does this mean that everyone in the class will be downgraded the same for writing or just my daughter? It seems incredibly unfair that seven years of attainment is completely wiped away. Surely seven sets of teachers can not be wrong? She will be very upset once the report comes out.

if anyone can shed some light on this for me
I would very much appreciate it.
Thank you.

Moderation is a pain though! We are informed on the Friday of SATS week whether we are to be moderated or not, so you have all the relief of the end of the tests and then the deflation of knowing you are to be moderated! We had 3 moderators ( 2 because we have 45 year 6 children and one who was moderating the moderators!) who crawled through 8 books. One moderator was fine, the other wanted proof across every piece of writing of every relevant objective. It was there, thank goodness, but it is anxiety inducing on the staff to find it sometimes, especially in the children who struggle to remember to use " yacht" and refer to boats throughout a piece ! ( We have a competition between year 6 teachers locally as to who can get the most obscure Year 6 spelling words used correctly in their writing, there are some very inventive genres and stimuli used!)

They all start off being teacher assessed. Every year the LA choose some schools to moderate, i.e. look closely at their teacher assessments of children's work to check that the teachers are applying the criteria correctly. It's likely to happen to every school every few years, but there's no regular pattern; moderation visits can be triggered by things like unusual results the previous year, or a new teacher in Y6. I don’t think there’s any way of knowing whether your school has had a moderation visit unless the school choose to tell you.

Honestly, this doesn't matter a bit. Your daughter may well still be a good writer and hopefully enjoys writing. DD did get greater depth in writing in her SATs (some years ago now) but in fact all the things she wrote at school that made up that picture were much worse pieces of writing than the things she wrote at home which were genuinely inventive and fun to read. The schoolwork was all endless strings of 'interesting' adjectives and verbs, making sure she'd got a semicolon and a fronted adverbial in, basically a box-ticking exercise. She got told what the boxes were, and ticked them, but most of the things she wrote with this method were not actually particularly good pieces of writing.

I expect your DD will be disappointed, but as it actually doesn't matter to her in any practical sense it's your job as a parent to point this out and tell her Mr X still thinks her writing is great and so do you. You could also point out, which I had to do when DD was stressing about maybe getting a lower grade than she wanted (but still a decent pass) in her GCSE biology, that there are thousands of children around the country who would absolutely love to have managed to achieve 'working at the expected standard' in anything at all so it's kind of not on to be treating it as a failure when it isn't.

SATs are many orders of magnitude less important to an individual child than GCSEs. This will not affect her future in any way, unless you make it into a bigger thing than it is. Please downplay it - you can allow her to feel sad about it and acknowledge that sadness without fostering a sense of injustice or resentment about something that honestly does not matter a bit. In your shoes, I'd be taking her for an ice cream after school or something and telling her you are very proud of her and know how hard she works (which is unrelated to any grade achieved or awarded).

My son's secondary definitely doesn't include writing in calculating target grades, or he wouldn't be predicted 7/8/9 for everything.

Yeah, I checked the progress 8 documentation and it isn't included in there. It is coverted to a scaled score and FFT use it for some aspects of their work but I may have been mixing it with a different FFT measure.

Because the MN algorithm is a bit crap