Primary teachers: is your school abandoning levels?

[straggle]

This feels like a massive change which has not had much publicity:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26176780

I'm a parent but would appreciate it if teachers could tell me how their school is preparing for this. I'm confused about what this means for SATS and how secondary schools are going to measure 'progress' to KS4. Is this just another opportunity for Gove to allow privatisation of the school curriculum? Have I missed a good thread on this?

It's up to individual schools to decide how they will assess after September straggle

But there will be a national test though? I don't mind how schools mark work on a daily basis.

There will be a national test age 11

It's really crap for those of us in weak schools with weak heads who only like to do the bare minimum.

I imagine lots of posters have grown up with levels whereas oldies like me remember a world before they were introduced ... and children still made progress!

Well my mother had a very poor education and yet was solid in grammer and maths and so on...( war baby). most of her generation seem the same, they all know the basics and have solid foundations.

tether what do you mean? are you being sarcastic?

It's really crap for those of us in weak schools with weak heads who only like to do the bare minimum

What does one do in a situation like that? Who do you complain to? It makes my blood boil to hear that Retro, they should not be in the job.

I'm pretty ancient and went to schools before levels. I'm constantly amazed by how much better my kids education is than my own. In my day, frankly no one seemed to care if anyone made much progress or not. You were either "clever", "in the middle" or "a bit thick". I suspect lots of kids slipped under the radar if they weren't making any progress.

Im only just getting my head around what levels are....please dont abandon them!

omg this percentile thing sounds like the perfect thing to whip up the over competitive parents into a frenzy.

I like the idea of percentiles, to me personally that's easier than levels. Will it be percentiles based on just the school, or a wider base?

My understanding is that all kids will be ranked as into which decile (is that a real word?) they fall i.e. 0 to 10th centile, 11th to 20th centile, etc. The results for the school will then be published. Parents will be told where their kids rank.

I can kind of understand it if you want to rank people effectively so that universities can chose the most academic kids to place on a course. But these kids are 11, some only 10. How does a 10 year old recover from being told they are the bottom of the bottom? Surely if you want children to start secondary school ready to take advantage of everything on offer, you want to give them solid basic skills, the belief that they have the potential to do well if they apply themselves and a love of learning.

And for those who think it's OK for their kids, because their kids are in the top 10 or 20 percentile, I think it's worth thinking about the effect on other kids who aren't ranked at the top. Because your kids are going to be taking classes with kids who are going to feel written off as failures at 11. And that IS going to effect behaviour and motivation.

Not a teacher but a parent governor. I wonder how pupils/ parents will react to "yes, and little Hermione is in the bottom 10% of her year group" not a great way to build confidence is it?

As a parent, at least levels were a straightforward way of trying to show where your own child should be against age related expectations, although I accept that they weren't any way ideal and didn't describe progress well.

Don't worry - Gove will want to ensure that all children are in the top 30% anyway.

you have no ambition YoureAllABunchOfBastards surely you mean they should all be in the top 10%

Knowledge of percentiles will be entirely unhelpful. Eg further to my post below, if parent is told their child is in the top 10% , that will tell you nothing about the progress they have made over the year- it may be in reality they started the year in the top 1%,a poor school did nothing to challenge and extend them and they finished the year at 9%. Similarly a child in the bottom 10% may have made a lot of personal progress and remain in the bottom 10%- how discouraging is that?
This kind of thing will simply encourage less good schools to continue to focus all their efforts on those on the middle, excluding the needs of those children falling at either extreme.

Sorry Mrsz. I am in secondary, hence the lack of ambition.

The next step will be to shoot all those in the bottom 50%. It's the kindest thing.

"tether what do you mean? are you being sarcastic?"

Sorry Buds, not sarcasm- I'm an advisory teacher for LAC, and part of my role is to monitor the progress and attainment of all children Looked After by the borough I work for. This involves liasing with 200-odd schools and tracking results. I'm just interested as to how this change will affect us.

neolara these days secondaries are expected to get Cs out of kids who got 3s in their ks2 SATs so arguably the centile won't really matter they are all expected to do well!

It smacks to me of Mao doubling china's national income by growing twice as much rice. The worrying thing being that Gove is elected.

The biggest news at the end of January was that the Reception baseline tests will go ahead.

The lesser news at the same time (because it had crept out quite a while back) was that there will NOT be deciles/rankings for those Secondary Readiness tests.

None of that is official yet of course and might change subject to some last minute whim.

PS: I know where Y6 DD sits in terms of national percentages simply by looking at prior national data for KS2 e.g. you can get it with NC sub-level resolution from (the public accessible part of) RAISE online.

YoureAllABunchOfBastards it's OK I teach in Durham and Mr Gove says he can smell the sense of defeatism in our secondary schools ...he's never visited any so me must have a good sense of smell

learningwithoutlimits.educ.cam.ac.uk/

Anyone heard of this lady and her approach?- no levels and no labelling. Inspirational .

In case that wasn't clear, I am referring to Dame Alison Peacock, who I was lucky enough to hear speak recently.

We're also tribal according to Mr Gove Paintyfingers. He's probably confusing us with the Picts