Going backwards measured by SAT levels - should I be asking why?

[MrAlbertoFrog]

Ds is in year 6 and has been in the 'top sets' of a large primary school for the last few years.
He has recently done a piece of assessed english work (involved continuing a story from a given paragraph) and was told he was working at a 3b level. He was very upset at this (as the whole class were talking about their levels and his was low compared to most of his friends) so we spoke to his teacher who insisted that he was 'where he is meant to be' and that he was expected to reach 4b by the end of the school year. This was pretty meaningless to me as I am/was not fluent in SAT levels but I looked at his end of year report for last year and he was assessed as '4b with his reading skills achieving higher than this'.

So, should I be asking school why he has gone backwards? Is this a normal occurrence due to teachers marking work differently?

The government actually says most children will have received a level 2 in Y2 and most children will reach level 4 in Y6 ...

4b is not the expected level for ALL pupils in Y6 a school would be seen as under performing if less than 60% of pupils failed to achieve level 4 or higher

I think this explains why mine got 5as for their y6 SATs and 3bs for their start of y7 assessments. They are the same children, with the same attainment levels, however to score 3b in y6 would have been bad for the "outstanding" primary. They were not "borderline", actually they were labelled g&t but that seemed to just create a job for someone who dished out papers for them to do, that could be done in the class anyway.

To be fair to their secondary schools, they took no notice of either 5a or 3b, they just got on with giving them a liberal education that obviously also delivered the real results.

I would seriously question that secondary school assessment - no child who achieves high nineties in KS2 tests is a 3b, no way. That's ridiculous. And the outstanding primary couldn't have faked the 5as, either.

As KS2 tests are externally marked (and the markers don't know the school or children) I would be questioning the secondary school levels.

But if secondaries (like all schools) benefit OFSTED-wise by showing progress, don't they have a vested intake in marking their Yr7 intake low? Although 5a to 3b sounds like they might have been milking it humongously understating a bit too much.

Or am I just being cynical now?

And fwiw DD1's maths top set last year (yr5) ranged from 3b to 5c - this was a small group of only 17 children, the other 80 were scoring below that. Oddly enough it's very different this year, but the school has enormous student turnover due to influx and exodus from US bases nearby.

The secondary is judged on progress from the KS2 results, not progress from the start of Y7.

Mum - this year the writing mark is teacher assessed, and not based on an exam.

good. That's how it should be. :)

The child will still do the writing tests but the school can choose to mark them internally or have them marked externally media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/k/assessment%20and%20reporting%20arrangements%20-%20key%20stage%202.pdf

From your doc:

The interim arrangements for English writing in 2012 will be similar to the approach at the end of Key Stage 1. A child?s English writing result will be a teacher assessment judgement of their work across Year 6. Teachers? judgements will be informed by and take account of (but not be limited by) the child?s result on a standard test.

So, the mark is not given by judging one piece of writing. :)

Agree with all those who say that you can't say anything from one piece of writing (or one single scientific study, for that matter, or a single moment in observing another parent's life ).

DS gets much higher marks from teacher assessment than he tends to get on the single exams: this is across subjects. I presume because the teachers are thinking about long-term things, they are thinking about whether he mostly does ABCXYZ? Not does he do ABCXYZ each and every time.

May I suggest if you get hold of his English paper & talk thru with the teacher where he got marked down, you can then discuss with your son anything he could pay special attention to in future to be more consistent. I found this very useful with DS & maths work.

Our school can't choose - we are in the writing sample this year. Don't have to do anything, and marks aren't reported.

Sorry, I should probably explain that - a small sample of schools will have their writing externally monitored for quality, like Science. So our children will have to sit them and we have to send them off - but the marks aren't reported, they are purely for sampling purposes. So we don't care [smile}.

I wouldn't get too worried about a single piece of work. If your DS is concerned, you can download copies of level descriptors for writing levels. The issue is that to get the highest marks the children need to be ticking lots of boxes so a lot of the level 5 writing (in my view) is really quite florid.

"It is the expected level of all children so bottom set children should be achieving it. (In the government's ideal world)"

Which just shows how out of touch with reality the government is. A Year 3 with SEN I taught last year made SUPERLATIVE progress during the year ... but still just scraped a 1c. If he makes accelerated progress of 2 sublevels from then until the end of Year 6, he will get a 3c. If he makes the expected progress of 3 sublevels every 2 years, he will get a 2b/2a. Either would represent a truly FANTASTIC achievement, far greater than many children getting Level 6s from a base of a secure 3 at the end of year 2.

He will not get a 4b, pigs would fly first - but the progress that he makes should be celebrated, not the final result denigrated.

Teacher - The government actually says most children will have received a level 2 in Y2 and most children will reach level 4 in Y6 ...

It's a myth that the govt wants every single child to get a 4b.

OK, then I will redirect my spleen to the poster from whom I quoted it, rather than the government...

In that case, that's a new(ish) move away from the 'expected' level suggestion. Level 2/4 used to be average levels for Y2/6, then David Blunkett made them 'expected'. I post a link to this BBC article a lot, but it does explain it well.

If we can now refer to them as levels which 'most' Y2/Y6 children will achieve, that's a welcome change!

All I know is that when my children were going through primary school we understood that 4B was the expected level countrywide. If things have changed that's fair enough. I don't think anybody would include children with SEN in those expectations, as you say, their progress is what matters. I work in KS1 and we would expect children to achieve 2s.

www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Schoolslearninganddevelopment/ExamsTestsAndTheCurriculum/DG_4015959

www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/DFE-RR096.pdf

page 8

says
Expected attainment for the majority of pupils at the end of key stage

Even the reporting form they used to give you for Y2 children's results had an explanation at the bottom about 2b being the expected level - not even level 2! They've not done that for a long while though, to be fair. So things must be a-changing.

Things haven't changed since 1999 hocuspontas
www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/QCA-99-457.pdf page 17

Range of levels within which the great
majority of pupils are expected to work
Key stage 1 1?3
Key stage 2 2?5
Key stage 3 3?7

Expected attainment for the majority
of pupils at the end of the key stage
Key stage 1 at age 7 2
Key stage 2 at age 11 4

"Expected attainment for the majority of pupils at the end of key stage"

Well, I am very close to (1 child away from) having a majority of children with SEN in my class (and it will be a majority in next year's cohort)... so it is still not hugely meaningful in that context... the majority of the non-SEN children will get 4b or higher at the end of KS2 but that does not always mean the majority of the children will.

But teacher, any child who isn't making progress will be put on the SEN register.

I bet the majority of kids in your class don't have such low IQs that reaching minimum expectations would be beyond them.

17 out of 29 in my class are currently on the SEN register I expect most to reach the expected level by the end of the KS