Regrading of Sats KS1 from infant to junior school

[bolderdash]

Without giving too much away, what advice would you give if your dc was regraded in their Sats for writing from a 3 to a 2c, having moved from the infants school to a separate junior school.

The dc was working at a level 2c this time last year and has improved a lot, so not really understanding how this can be.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Levels are subjective and can easily be overestimated. Different schools also level in different ways.

Basically, don't pay too much attention to it.

From an ex-teacher: levels are a load of rubbish. Far more important to get qualitative feedback from your child's teacher.

You will go throught the same markarly when your child starts secondary. National curriculum levels do not port across keystages well. In keystage 1 there are plenty of TAs and tasks are not timed. Its far harder in juniors as children are expected to be so much more independent. I expect your child is having to settle in a new school and make new friends and this is causing him to backwards for a bit.

This is a known potential issue when there are infant and junior schools. Obviously the infant school will assess the pupil and come up with the "best" level they think that is realistic for the pupil, that is the level 3. The infant school have to show good progress in the years pupils are at the school for Ofsted.
The problem comes if the infant school tend to grade inflate because that immediately means that the junior school in trying to show good progress in the 4 years the pupil is at the school has to achieve a higher level. So in your situation if the level 3 is actually level 3C, then by the end of the junior years they would be expected to be level 5C, whereas the junior school have remeasured the pupil as 2C when expected progress would be to 4C. The junior school are retesting so that they have a baseline to show that pupils are making good progress in the school, because a whole level lower is quite a big change.
That of course assumes that the two schools are leveling a piece of work at exactly the same level, which they might not.
The other competing issue here is that the summer holidays also tends to show a reversal of attainment in many pupils, so the drop from 3 to 2c may be simply timing and therefore with a short period of time in the junior school they will get back to the level 3 they were assessed at prior to the summer break.

This happened to DD (Level 3 in infants, 2b on entering juniors). She needs to be focussed to write at Level 3 - obviously at her infants school they had time to assess her over a period of time, had more piecies of writing to choose from and realised her strengths and encouraged her to work to them.

In juniors she didn't do her "Best writing" in the assessed pieces (which were done very shortly after starting).
Her teacher has since had more time to see what she is capable of and has now a better idea of what she needs to work on (which is correct IMO). I'm happy that the teacher understands her actual capability - which is more important to me than her level IYSWIM!!

Thank you for the reassuring comments.

I feel some comfort in that they seemed to have regraded everybody down. But still a bit confused by the extent of it - 3 sub levels to the level she was working at happily and successfully a year ago.

Redsky - that does make sense. She's quite shy and sometimes lacks concentration. If they are assessing on a small amount of work it's quite possible she hasn't really shown them her capability yet. And her ability to work independently is probably quite poor - she's immature in that sense.

I think I'm just panicking that they're setting her back a year.

I think some here have said that different schools grade in different ways.

So if your school give you a list of the criteria for a particular level, is that something they have produced themselves or is it standardised across the board?

National curriculum levels exist officially, sublevels don't. How to assess whether a pupil meets the criteria for a level varies from school to school.

There's no science to it.

Thank you Noble.

I have a teacher friend who works in a primary school in another LA that still has middle schools. Her school uses the optional Y4 tests as the children then move into Y5 at the middle school. All taken under test conditions and marked by the teachers using the test mark schemes. Several primary schools then meet to moderate these levels. These papers are passed on to the middle schools with the children's most recent maths and writing books to give a full range of evidence of their levels. All of this because it was agreed by the primary and middle school heads as the best assessment transition.

However the middle school retests all the children in the very first week at the new school. No basic lessons first to relax the children and get them back into school routines, just straight in to tests. The children have not settled into a new (and for some scary) school, with new staff and routines. They have had a six week holiday and many children will have done no reading, writing or maths during that period. Not surprisingly the new school gets much lower levels from their tests than either the teacher assessment or end of Year 4 test levels. My friend wonders why she bothers spending hours of wasted teaching time administering the Y4 tests and hours of marking and moderating time! Must say I totally agree with her. Poor teacher and poor kids! One of the Middle School teachers says they don't bother looking at the children's books either. They just use their tests to stream the children!

If teachers use APP there is some "science" behind the sub-levels. I can't find a link, but for example in Level 2 Writing;
For level 2C:
3 AFs out of AF6, AF5, AF1 and AF2
2 AFs out of AF7, AF8 and handwriting
For level 2B:
all or almost all of level 2 AFs
For Level 2A:
all of level 2 and some of level 3 AFs

If you google "making a level judgement" there are examples for level 1 and then level 3 and above.

newname I've googled the DfE guidance, and looked at some 'making a level judgement' stuff and at best it says "have a bit of a think and decide whether low, secure or high, in your impression, best describes that pupil"

Apart from that vague instruction, even deciding whether a child meets a particular statement is going to be subjective. Looking at maths and deciding whether a child can find the mode of a set of objects - if you have a piece of work in front of you where they have all the questions right, but they are easy, does that count? What if they get some wrong? How many wrong?

It's a nice tick boxing exercise to show what sorts of things the children have been doing, but to say that it can form a consistent system for subleveling children that will cause agreement in assessment between teachers let alone schools is far too optimistic.

Apart from anything, just look at this thread. How well the teacher knows the kids, how much work they have available to them and how the kid performs under observation is going to throw the system right at the start.

We do have very strict criteria in my cluster of primary schools and the secondary we feed into. We have regular (at least termly meetings) within school and with the Year 7 teachers to level and moderate each others work using the model I mentioned before. We cannot award an AF statement when we've seen it just once, but it needs to be seen several times to decide it has been fully achieved and applied in their writing. We have an inhouse recording system that notes when specific criteria are seen in independent writing. We also annotate all work to identify the level of support given so overly-supported work is not used in assessing whether a child has mastered that skill (essential at L2 and above).
In maths we have termly school-made test based assessments that we use to help update the APP. We tick off criteria when we have seen it in lessons in one colour and then another colour pen if they have answered the test questions correctly relating to that statement.
We don't use the APP guidelines, as such, but we do use the statements in excel spreadsheets so we can note how many times we have seen that specific statement (and then decide when to finally award it) and we have all the class on one page so we can use it to inform our weekly and even daily planning.

Do you find that your teacher assessment matches the KS2 SATs results for each pupil?

Ours does - but sometimes we get a child who scrapes into the next level.

I know which judgement I prefer.

Even in terms of sublevels?

My experience as a secondary teacher looking at teacher assessment and KS2 results is not that they match even most of the time.

Pretty much, actually - certainly to within one sublevel.

Just you or across the school?

I have to say I'm exceptionally surprised that you can distill a child's ability across several strands in maths across various statements of achievement into not just a level, but a level within a level and have that independently confirmed by an external test that is levelled in a completely different way.

That's just not my experience as a teacher.

Ours is sometimes a sub-level out between test and TA, and quite often we would be able to tell you which children will gain lower levels on tests, as they are the children that get distracted / stressed. When the higher level is on the test we get the SLT/English co-ordinator to help re-moderate the teacher assessment levels or take that child's evidence to the cross school moderation we do. It usually ends up going with the teacher assessment level. As I'm sure you know the tests will only test a small part of the curriculum, but teacher assessments looks at all the areas. Some children are just lucky in that they understands the areas which come up on the test paper, but are not really working securely at a particular level so we would be doing them (and future teachers) a disservice in awarding the higher level, just because they got the questions they could do.

When I observed a teacher administering the Year 2 comprehension test many years ago (when the test was all there was to report) I saw a non-reader score a strong 2C without being able to read any of the comprehension paper. He avoided the questions that needed a written answer and just completed the multiple choice questions by ticking one of the boxes. Purely by chance he got almost all of these correct! Interesting debate as to what to report, because in my opinion he should not have even been entered for the L2 paper as he was a W level reader.

It sounds like a huge amount of work. Useful for planning lessons, but then completely binned when they get to secondary school and with the move to linear GCSEs with no coursework, completely irrelevant by the time they hit 16.

What will happen to all this app stuff when levels are scrapped?

"What will happen to all this app stuff when levels are scrapped?" - Very good question!

It did start off as a huge job and I have streamlined the paperwork as we went. As a school (and group of schools) we have proved by this that our level judgements are sound and should be trusted by the next school, parents and Gove (! But then maybe not him, as he'll never trust teachers), and that this process has up-skilled (hate the phrase but does explain the long process of understanding how to make those level judgements) the teachers in all aspects of assessing and planning next steps. It has become a much quicker activity and we do cut corners now as we feel we have proved ourselves. However, we do feel in limbo with what the new curriculum and the assessment of it will bring. I think we will follow the similar approach of working as a group of schools to come up with our new approach .... just not sure what yet! Have anyone else's schools got an assessment plan in place yet?

Schools however cannot change the SATS results no matter how much they disagree with them. If your DD has entered Year 3 with an official level 3 for her Year 2 SATS then that is her level no matter what her new teacher says. If she doesn't get to level 5 by Year 6 for example, the school would be deemed to have failed her even if they disagree about her being a level 3 in the first place. The same is true at secondary. Children who enter with level 5's and 6's cannot have their Year 6 results downgraded no matter what they score in any tests in Year 7.

Levels in NC tests are on the child's record and form the basis for the levels they are expected to achieve at the end of the following Key Stage. This data is crucial for schools as they will be judged, by Ofsted and in the 'league tables', by their performance in moving the child on by 2 levels over the Key Stage. If a school levels a child lower at the start of a Key Stage than they were at the end of a previous Key Stage it isn't a 'downgrade', it just gives them a more realistic idea of where to place the child and what they have to do to move them on by the expected 2 levels from their 'official' level. A good school will be constantly monitoring each child's progress and teaching them as appropriate to achieve their (nationally imposed) 'target' level.

Schools are not pleased when a child appears to have a lower level than their 'official level'; it means more work for them...

The whole school - I am Lit coordinator and SMT.

I predict most schools will just continue with the whole APP sublevel circus.

You don't like APP then feenie?