If your year 6 child is sitting the level 6 SAT's....

[marne2]

Are they attending extra maths lessons?

My dd has been 'chosen' to take part in extra maths ( after school club ) at another school, something to do with 'gifted and talented'. Her teacher hasn't really explained much, only 2 children in her year are attending. I have been told it's related to next years SAT's and the level 6 paper. I am confused . Dd's school doesn't really have a G&t register as its a small school, my dd and her friend are the only ones sitting the level 6 next year ( or so we have been told, this may change ).

Has anyone else's child been asked to attend extra maths lessons or a maths club?

Mine isn't, but he's at a very small school where all the pupils are taught maths according to their own abilities, anyhow, and he's the only one in his class working at level 6.

I think sometimes schools have to play it by ear a bit. Each child varies and has different interests. L6 tests would not be suitable for DS so I know they will introduce appropriate ones. I think schools seem to be a bit better at thinking outside the box for ways to stimulate now, so I am not to concerned.

Pique - I think the reason is because last years yr6 were left too late really to get a chance of L6. They started at around Xmas of yr6.

DS's year group has a very real chance of some kids getting a L6 & so they are taking no chances!

I guess yr6 will be more SATS driven (past papers) & consolidation.

"DS's year group has a very real chance of some kids getting a L6"

Well they have no chance of getting an L6 which makes starting in Y5 seem like a quite decent idea: the current Y5 will be sitting the new-improved [whatever] end-KS2 exams based on the new curriculum.

It will be interesting to see how many questions it has in L6 territory. One of the things I like about the current L6 SAT papers is that there are plenty of questions so some room to be human and make a few silly mistakes.

Pique - I had totally forgotten about the new curriculum (doh) so yes I guess it makes starting in yr5 more sensible. I doubt any of them will be L6 at the end of the year (still being in yr5) but it does mean that the school can go at a slower pace to really make sure the kids really get to grips with it.

Level is going so why does the school bother

Maybe to stretch the more able kids??

I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that if children are doing extra maths lessons to cover level 6 material (before school, after school or during lunchtime) then what are they doing during regular maths lessons? Could it be level 5 material?

That wouldn't make sense because why would you teach level 6 before the children have already reached a solid grasp on the level 5 stuff? Ot if they have grasped it, then why would you make them sit through a years worth of lessons on it?

That is because it's a bulk education system that doesn't really accommodate a child much more than one standard deviation away from the mean.

DD actually had a weekly off-piste (and eventually L6) lesson instead of the normal class Numeracy. She went off for a piano lesson during another, so that left three when sometimes it was paired working with a roughly similar child on more challenging work etc.

Dd2 is sitting L6 in maths and reading. No extra classes.

Should have said my answer to the OP for DS2:

maths: taken out of regular maths lessons with the G&T group to prepare for L6 with a parent volunteer.

English: normal english lessons, but with differentiated targets

Am desperately intrigued to find out what is standard deviation above the mean for this point in yr6. And how do you know?

DS is yr7 and did the the level maths 6 paper last year. He didn't have extra lessons, but would have loved a maths club.

"Am desperately intrigued to find out what is standard deviation above the mean for this point in yr6. And how do you know?"

Assessment is hopelessly devoted to the Bell Curve. Once upon a time I grabbed some public national data e.g. from RAISE online etc. and turned it into made some pretty graphs. The results are essentially bell-curves except with very visible distortions courtesy of boosting to floor-levels and teaching and assessment ceilings at the end of key-stages e.g. for KS2 it was 5a (now 6 but secondary immediately trash that), for KS3 it's 8a and in KS4 it's GCSE A*.

It's not difficult to see where the curve would have gone if the children at the top hadn't been constrained. +1 SD is a rough guess as opposed to a meticulous result and it might be as far as +1.5 or somewhere between.

Back when they were calling primary assessment "Secondary Readiness" we were once told that they expected 16% to fail. On a perfect bell-curve 15.9% of the population can be found below -1 SD.

You can deduce some bell curve info from the department of education performance table where they calculate the average across all schools.

e.g. this is the data for maths ks2 results in 2013 (2014 hasn't been published yet).

                         England - all schools	England - state funded schools only

% achieving level 3 or below 15% 15%
% achieving level 4 or above 85% 85%
% achieving level 4B or above 73% 73%
% achieving level 5 or above 41% 41%
% achieving level 6 7% 6%

Raw score data would obviously be better, but the RAISE Online data you can get from the public part of their library (no logon required) has sub-level granularity so you have more data points to make a graph.

The 2014 preliminary raw data for whole levels has been published. For L6 it was roughly:

Reading: 0.15%
Maths: 8.9%
SPaG: 3.8%

For reference in 2013 I had:

Reading: 0.4%
Maths: 6.5%
SPaG: 1.6%

You can disagree a little on these based on which categories you exclude from the total number of eligible children.

This is why I claim the 2014 L6 Reading was broken, although alternatively it might be the first time it was fixed.

Sorry.. i am probably being dense, but I don't follow. Why do you say 2014 L6 reading is broken?

You can disagree a little on these based on which categories you exclude from the total number of eligible children.

Private schools (educating 7% of children) and home educated children are also presumably excluded.

Because as expected the pass rates increased. There were threats to publish the data at school level, more entered, more experience teaching it etc.

But not for L6 Reading where the pass rate plummeted this year. I presume no one has answered for that because it's a minority interest, but imagine the size of the storm if the GCSE English A*-C passes in 2014 had been 40% of last year's number.

The outcomes aren't comparable: an L6 Reading pass in 2013 is not the same as a pass in 2014.

"Private schools (educating 7% of children) and home educated children are also presumably excluded."

The total number eligible for SATs, so on the books at a state school subject to SATs.

But is a decrease from 0.4% to .15% significant? i.e. can you draw any valid conclusions from it?

How many children are actually involved?

(I suspect you can get the actual % piqueaboo, but as far as I recall, the 2012 pass rate rounded to 0 too and that was the first L6 year. So, its never been higher than 0.49%, if I am right about those two things).

Those percentages are of all Y6 children not the ones who took the test, so times them by five to get the approximate entrant pass rate if you like but it won't help.

I could paraphrase, but (as ever from this source) here is a good discussion with lots of information etc.:

giftedphoenix.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/what-happened-to-the-level-6-reading-results/

Try not to miss the part about them screwing up the test instructions which meant some children got more time than others i.e. a basic mistake that undermines confidence in every other aspect of the test.

Can someone translate previous posts to
math KS2 SAT median = level X
math KS2 SAT child working at 1 SD above median = level Y

what are X & Y? Thx.

Using the figures I took, given that they are for just one subject and for just one year, then you could calculate the following:-

You know 73% get 4b or better and 41% get 5C or better.
therefore:-
32% get either a 4b or a 4a
and 27% get worse than a 4b.

The median is at the 50%. So, the median is either a 4b or a 4a, but we don't know how many gets each sublevel.

Teachers tend to work very hard to encourage natural level 4c children to squeeze a 4b (for the statistics) and natural 4a's up to a 5. So, there could easily be a lot more 4bs than 4as.

If I had to guess, I'd say the median is 4B, but it could just as easily be 4a.

1 s.d is 2/3rds around the mean. So that would be the 83.3 centile which from the data I took (for maths in 2013) is a 5 of some kind. As 5s range from the 59th centile up to the 93.5 centile, and we're looking for the 83rd centile, it might be reasonable to guess that the answer is a lowish 5A.

So, x = 4B and Y = 5A.