How are infant schools assessed?

[Clare123]

Hi, was wondering if someone could help me? I know that my DD infant school does SATS, but are they externally looked at? At my child's school there is a growing concern about the standard of education from the parents, but the teachers keep saying they are are achieving above the national standards.

Can anyone help?

I'm confused-are you asking how the children are assessed or how the teaching is assessed?

The children will be assessed using teacher assessment (often APP) and whilst they will probably do some SATs papers at some point during Y2. The results of these tests will not be reported to you (or even the LEA in our case); you will be told the teacher assessment levels.

Are you suggesting that their assessment of the children is inaccurate?

Each year only some schools KS1 results get moderated externally.

And the school doesn't know if they'll be externally moderated or not.....

The problem is the parents don't think the school is doing well in getting their children ready for junior school, but the school keeps telling the parents that they are achieving above the national standards. So, who do you believe the parents (whose kids have left and are now at junior school) or the the school?

One of the problems about separate infant and junior schools is that there is often a "dip" in year 3. This may be because of slightly different assessment methods by teachers. If the infant and junior schools are partner schools where one feeds directly into another then it is good practice for teachers from KS1 and 2 to work together to bring about consistency in assessment. However this is very difficult to do if several infant schools feed into one junior school.
Infant schools do have targets for KS1 SATs that are passed on to the LEA and if there is a dip in these results the LEA would monitor this. There is data available for school governors on how these assessments compare with the LEA average and the national average but the full details of this information are not available to parents as KS1 results are not published. However schools are also "banded" so that they are compared with schools in a similar catchment area nationally and if these results are above the average then the school is considered to be a good school.

KS1 results are moderated by the LEA in my area schools can expect a visit every other year and in between teachers attend meetings and take along samples of pupils work.