When are Year 2 SATs taking place?

[ExpectoPatronum]

My DD is in Yr2, so SATs are coming up.

Her school takes a very, very laid back approach to SATs - absolutely nothing, nada, not one jot of information about them has been provided to parents.

In many ways I support this - they're 6 and 7 year olds for heaven's sake, I'd rather the whole thing was low key and no huge fuss was made about it.

However, I do feel I'd like to know if my 7 year old was sitting tests in a given week. Is there a set week in which they take place? Do schools get to do them whenever they like? I heard some dark mutterings about the week commencing 9 May, is this the case?

What do you know? Please spill the beans!

Suppose it depends which average you are looking at, but 50% would happen at the very end of 2b. Am numerical but never done that much detailed stats.

Feenie - School have started to trot out the normal rubbish that 2c is the expected level not 2b. Do you have a reference that says expected is 2b not 2c?

Or is it just that 'level 2' is open to interpretation....

I think calling it "expected" is an odd word to choose. I would expect DS to get higher than 2b (as do his teachers). But for other children them getting a 2c would be exceeding expectations.

Interesting article on concept here

Racking my brains to find something that refers to it, Indigo, will keep trying. I have a feeling that the suggested forms used to report to parents had an explanation on the bottom which referred to it, but the ones this year just say level 2 is the expected level - would need my work computer to check it used to be the case. Lots of schools target 2c children for intervention in Y3 - they are seen as just below the required level, and at risk of not achieving level 4 in Y6.

A very quick Google reveals one LEA's advice here

As a teacher my school looks at progress as opposed to 'expected levels'. So I dance in delight when a child on 1c reaches his 1a target as much as I dance with delight when a child who entered at 4c gets to 4a by the end of the year - and for various reasons there are children who make less or more progress than that in a year. Luckily I don't teach in an 'externally reported' year grup, though, and the school I teach in focuses much much more on the progress made by each individual child than they do on 'reaching the expected level' . Focus on an 'expected level' tends to see teacher effort focused in the small group clustered just below that borderline and the very able and the less able left to make less progress....

www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000947/index.shtml

teacherWith2Kids - it's all very well being pleased when a child makes expected progress - but is of no comfort at all to the kids/parents who don't reach expected levels.

If DD makes expected progress this year (Y3) (ie goes from a 1c to a 1a - which she is unlikely to if they are honest with their reporting) I certainly won't be pleased. I will still be racking my brains and doing absolutely everything I can do to get her up to a 2a over Summer which is the minimum she needs to be.

But yes, I suspect, her teacher would be pleased. Her teacher will have reached her goals....

(And if she only makes a 1b - again the teacher isn't going to lose nearly as much sleep over it as me)

If your daughter makes 2 sub levels of progress within a year indigo, then that is good progress for her, not for her teacher. I don't know any teachers who would see it that way. If she is a 1c in Year 3 then she should be getting extra support in school which will continue as she goes through the school and if she is not, then something needs to be done.
Year 6 SATs are next week but the Year 2 ones are, as others have said, done over a much longer period. I have no idea if my son has done any yet - I don't think so as they always get really excited about the tables being moved around and that hasn't been mentioned yet!

Actually the whole "sub level" concept is purely notional it isn't actually possible to measure and the targets (from where the idea originated) is that children make 2 full levels progress per key stage, which breaks down to 2/3s of a level per year in KS2.

I should add that is not considered good progress merely satisfactory.

Lilac - so what are teachers measured on then? They do have targets they are mention to meet....

Having looked at MRZ link (thank you), as the mum of an end of Aug boy, oh dear. We were not told expectations at parent evening just that actual level would be on July report. Thank goodness rural school with only 1 class per year so (not openly admitted) streaming is merely by tables.

Let's apply a little common iense here.

Children are all different. We cannot and should not expect them to all reach a certain level at a certain point in time - there is natural variability in the population. Some children find 'school work' (I use the term loosely, having thought about and not found a useful alternative) easy, others find it harder. some children find one aspect of school work - e.g. maths - harder than another - e.g. reading. All kinds of factors - genetic, family background, illness, disability, specific learning difficulty - contribute to this.

I was perhaps over-simplistic in my post above. What I mean is that my aim (the reason I teach, nothing to do with 'targets') is for all children to make progress, understanding where they start from (and why they start from there) and moving them on. If I focus on 'expected levels' then I would set some children up to fail (and fail to recognise the huge progress they make by saying 'but you haven't reached the expected level') and would hold others back hideously.

To take an example from my class. I have a child who works at a lower level than expected for his age because he suffered some brain damage as a baby. I know where he is in all his learning, I provide opportunities for him to make progress in every lesson from that starting point, I assess where he is at the end of the lesson, as I do for all the children. I then start the next lesson at that point. He is making, and knows he is making, progress with a very high level of support. Should the rate of that progress start to bring him up towards expected levels, that would be fantastic and there is nothing that I and my TA would love to see more. Just because it is more likely that he will not reach expected levels but will make progress, does not mean we do not try to acheive this - but we will still rejoice in the progress he does make, so he has satisfaction as a learner.

Equally, I have a child who works very much ahead of expected levels for her age. She has always made more progress than expected in every year, which is why she is so far ahead. I would be failing in my duty as a teacher if I said 'oh, it's ok, she's achieved the expected level', or even 'it's OK, she's made the expected level of progress' - it is my role to continue to extend her, to see if she can continue to make this accelerated progress.

Indigobell - I do not know your daughter. If there is a specific barrier to her learning that has kept her within Level 1 and that barrier can be removed (am I right in thinking that she has just successfully learned to read?) then it may indeed be that she can 'fly up through the levels'. However, again thinking of my class, the children who sit at that level or lower in my class do not have 'one simple to remove' barrier that has held back their learning. With high levels of support and very targeted interventions to gradually 'chip away' at these multiple barriers, they are making good progress, but I might question how realistic a whole level during a 6 week summer holiday aspiration might be? As I say, i do not know your particular circumstances and whether there has been a failure to diagnose a specific problem that has now been solved, so apologies.

I think most teachers focus on expected levels and ensuring individual children make as much progress as they possibly can, and we are measured on both of these aspects. It would be no good a school achieving 100% level 4s in Y6 - Ofsted and LEAs would demand to know why more able children weren't attaining higher levels, and rightly so.

they are making good progress - this is my point. They are almost certainly not making good progress. They are making progress you are happy with - but not good progress. And it depends on the child and the parent whether the parent is happy with the progress or not.

Low expectations of children like my DD (especially re-defining the term 'good progress') are a huge part of why she isn't making good progress.

I realise you didn't mean your post the way I took it. And I assume you are a great and dedicated teacher. I'm just trying to put across the other point of view. Because my experience is that teachers are always happy with my kids progress - even when they make none.

I will never be happy till DD is where she should be academically. I will not accept 'dyslexia' (or sorry, the more PC term 'Specific Learning Disability') as an excuse for her not learning. This makes me very unpopular with the staff who think they are doing absolutely everything they can for her.

But in reality they are not doing everything they can. They are doing their best. They are doing the best they know how to using the resources they have. But there is no way they are really doing everything they can.

On one hand, they want me to accept that she will always struggle and find reading and writing hard. But it's OK cause they know loads of dyslexics with Uni degrees....

On the other hand when she did learn to read because of therapies I have done with her they are very quick to claim it as a success with their teaching.

You don't know if the children in your class with SpLD have 'one simple to remove' barrier or not. Because until you do all the diff therapies you don't know if they will work or not. There is no way you can know that AIT or Vision Therapy or Dore or Brain Gym or Neuro Development Program or ...... will work - because you can't try them.

All you know is that you have done your best. And that you are pleased with the progress the child has made.

It's not very fair of me to have a go at you on a public forum - but then again for all I know you are my DDs teacher :)

That's not quite true Indigo - yes in general schools can't access things like AIT and VT because as you know it is highly specialised but Dore, Brain Gym and NDT are used in many schools

I would also say that my 'multiple barriers' comment is because the kids in my class who work very far below age expected level do not have a 'single diagnosable learning difficulty', they suffer from neglect, domestic abuse (or have been removed from situations of domestic abuse), foetal alcohol syndrome, illness-induced brain damage to name but a few.

Brain Gym and NDT I have used. Where we do have children with specific learning difficulties / disabilities I have received specific training and we have called in / referred the children to appropriate specialists to advise us on how best to move the child forward. Perhaps because of that, we have no child - and half my class is on the SEN register - with a 'single diagnosable difficulty' who is that far below expected levels.

So I suspect that I am not your child's teacher and do not work in your child's school!

Yes - David Blunkett changed the terms 'average levels' to 'expected levels'.

This is such a joke I think! Assuming we can decide what "expected" means, there's a big difference between expected and average. Average would imply that statistically, half the children should be below that grade with a normal distribution. I'm wondering whether this is why so many sercondary schools say the the SATS results children get in Year 6 are often over-inflated! If the grades were originally designed to show the average child and schools now have to show most pupils getting at leas a 4b or whatever, then schools will have to teach to the test, and coach dramatically to get this kind of result!

Politicians should stop messing with education in my view!

teacherwith2kids Indigo's child doesn't have a single diagnosable difficulty either which is why she has put so much effort into finding ways to help her daughter to overcome barriers to her learning. AIT is at the end of a very long list and has seen a remarkable breakthrough for her and understandably after many years of frustration Indigo doesn't want the school to settle for satisfactory progress.

I understand that Mrz - though apologies to Indigo as I had misread her posts to mean that her daughter had been diagnosed with dyslexia, that is my fault as a new member who was not aware of all the background.

I do, however, find it difficult that from this very specific case in a single school, any generalisation can be made about all teachers in all schools. I genuinely do not believe that I, or any of my colleagues 'settle for' satusfactory progress. In many cases, 2 sublevels of progress (however imperfectly measured that may be) in a single year is truly extraordinary progress given the nature of the difficulties a particular child is facing in and out of school . In others, 2 sublevels is absolutely inadequate progress as the child was capable of making much much more. This thread started off being about 'expected levels' and whether they are a meaningful or helpful concept given the inherently variable nature of children - what do you think?

Personally I don't think assigning a numerical value to a given point in a child's development is particularly meaningful but someone in their wisdom decided that progress has to be measurable (as if it is linear) so we live with it.

DDs diagnosis and only problem is 'dyslexia'.

And this is what I don't get. All the teachers on here claim that they don't fail dyslexic children and manage to teach all children to read.

And yet all the dyslexic children I know in RL have been failed by school and can't read properly.

I'm not sure if it's because my defn of 'reading properly' is diff to the teachers, or because the teachers on here aren't representative of the teaching community, or if the children I know aren't representative. Or if the teachers think that the kids they fail don't have dyslexia (when they do).

But somehow none of it adds up.

From my experience of RL DD is no worse than many other kids.

What I think is going on is that teachers genuinely think they aren't settling for satisfactory progress - but that the parents of those kids would disagree....

It is also complicated by the fact that schools seem to have a policy of not telling the truth and always assuring parents that their child is doing well and there is nothing to worry about......

And of course teachers normally only have a kid for 1 year, and then they're not their concern any more. Every teacher claims good progress in July, and then in Sep the kids magically seem to have backtracked a year....

Although of course equally there a lot of parents who believe the experts who tell them that their kid will always struggle, and then lower their expectation....

But what is "dyslexia" Indigo? because one child with dyslexia presents as having having different difficulties to another child with dyslexia.
My son was diagnosed as dyslexic by the LEA EP despite the fact that he had been reading long before he started nursery (without any instruction) a child in school also diagnosed as dyslexic has coloured lenses to correct reading difficulties and your daughter has responded well to AIT. One label

I guess I'm just being stupid.

Some schools do teach all their kids (ie get 100% L4+), and some schools only teach most of their kids (anything as low as 60% L4+).

It is perfectly possible that the teachers who post on here teach in the good schools, and the schools I know are the average type which only teach 70 - 80% of their kids......

Mrz - yes. Dyslexia is the stupidest label ever. And there is no (one) defn of the word dyslexia. Unfortunately that is the only dx I have - and dyslexia is generally understood to be difficulties learning to read and write, which clearly does describe DD.

I don't think DD has dyslexia, because I don't think dyslexia exists at all. (I think, like you, that there are many diff reasons why people struggle with reading/writing - and using one label is not helpful.) But I use it as a shortcut for 'unexplained difficluties with learning to read and write'

Teacher - I'm glad that you care more about your individual children and what is good progress for them, rather than applying a generic formula to your expectations. :)

And anyone who really does think they can teach all kids is welcome to PM me about tutoring DD