Is this common practice ?

[nursiecat]

My yr3 child has come home from school upset following an end of year reading assessment. She was told she had not done well enough in the test and was made to re-do it in the afternoon.

I have told her she can only do her best and not to worry. I am now wondering if she was marked too high in yr2 and her teacher is struggling to show enough progress.

The question is whether she thinks she 'should have done better' because she works at a higher level day to day or whether it's because she hasn't met the target.

That's a better way of looking at it. Please ignore my comment about hoping DD was messing around, feeling stupidly over emotional of something quite trivial really.

Thank you for the replies, which have been from quite a few different viewpoints.

Don't apologise nursie it's perfectly understandable that you feel upset about this. Whatever the reason, your dd shouldn't have been left feeling this way.

I'm hoping that the teacher didn't feel your dd's first effort reflected her true ability. Hope you feel better after you have met with the teacher.

Feeling a bit nervous about speaking to the teacher. Apart from parents evenings I don't do it often, which suggests the school is generally good. My eldest dd is in yr 6 and just finished her SATS. No extra pressure there.

nursiecat:

Certainly many primary schools here (Birmingham) regularly test (beginning of school year/ end of each term) using old SATs papers.

Our school (which is particularly week) seem to use it as a check on teacher's assessments. This is because traditionally teacher assessment (TA on SATs reports) are often out by as much as 20% (in our case overestimating ability).

I think that you should be signalling to your DD that this is just a test for the teacher to see how she's doing and if she has asked her to take it again, that's really quite a compliment - that's saying that the teacher thought she should be doing better (although I take the point that it may be that the teacher needs/ wants her to do better).

Frankly from here on out in your child's education testing is going to be quite normal & frequent - so the best approach really is to treat it as 'no big deal' - 'a necessary evil' - 'a useful yardstick of progress' - but not to get overly worried about the result of any individual test.

As you've rightly said - she's only 8. She sounds like she's doing really well - and as any teacher will say (and they do here frequently) pupil progress is never steady. I also agree the jump from NC L3 to NC L4 (and indeed NC L4 to NC L5) is a big one. One of the shortcomings of this performance related pay system is that there isn't the flexibility within it to allow a pupil to have a slow or bad year (which can happen for all sorts of reasons - immaturity, family crisis, bereavement, illness, not liking that year's teacher or their teaching style, etc....).

HTH

That's really helpful thank you.