Ability levels

[wishiwasonthebeach]

Do teachers tell parents which ability level table children are working on?

My son is in year 1 and I know that each table has an animal name, I imagine that they must be working in ability sets but I have no idea what sort if level he is on.

Parents evening was very general, the teacher mostly told me what they have been working on and some targets for literacy. When I tried to find out more about my son in particular she was quite dismissive. I don't know if I should ask her about the tables arrangement or if that's not appropriate.

Buit again, Mrz, I am not talking about levels - I am talking about data, but data that (with the Ofsted regime unlikely to change, and with parents wanting to make reliable comparisons between schools and to understand how their children are performing in a national context rather than a school context) allows reliable, robust school to school comparison at the individual child and subgroup level.

My understanding is that there is benchmarking between different GCSE boards - so schools cannot choose to follow an 'easy' GCSE route. There is no benchmarking possible between different school level data production systems that are based on... nothing....

My school reports are from roughly the same era as yours, Mrz. I went to 5 primary schools. In one I was performing 'at the level expected of the class'. At another, I was considered so advanced that I had to be put up a year. That cycle (in own year / up a year) happened twice over, due simply to diffeences in expectations, teaching and practice between the schools. Was I making progress? Quite hard to tell....

this was OK, because there was no expectation at the time that parents would expect to be able to know where their child sat in the wider context, compared with others their age. In at least 1 of the schools, that meant that very, very significant underachievement was never challenged.

Expectations today, along with accountability, are entirely different.

chickenfish
are there good reasons not to tell if the parents ask?
why would schools/teachers hide information from parents?

Surely the "benchmarks" are the National Curriculum "

My school reports don't mention the class (probably pointless as for most of my time there were three children in the class) only my achievement scores for tests and A, B, C plus or minus

I always ask which group my DCs are in for literacy and maths or how they are doing compared to the national average after a couple of parents evenings where I walked out of the school with no clear idea of my elder DC's progress.. We don't have NC levels in Scotland and it can be difficult to work out how your kids are doing. One teacher would only tell me that my DC was doing "fine for his abilities". Without further explanation as to what his abilities were compared to the national average I had no idea whether he was doing well or badly compared to his peers. Asking which table he was on seemed to be an easy way of achieving this information. I now realise this could be skewed depending on whether he is in a year which is doing well or poorly compared to the national average.

cloutiedumpling
I agree, it seems to be very difficult to find out how your dc is doing
what is the problem with asking the question
and what is the problem with answering it

The problem I would have answering is I don't have any groups
I can tell you about your child but it seems that isn't good enough for MN parents

I think a lot of MN parents have children at bigger more urban schools. Where your child sits within a class of 30 has more meaning than where your child sits within a class of 3, of course.

Mrz
I presume that the school is able to tell parents where dc is in relation to the national average for that subject?
I still don't understand what is wrong with the school telling a parent how well or not their dc is doing in meaningful/useful terms
obviously the parents would like to know that their dc is doing well, but actually it is important to know if they are not, so that they may be able to do something about it
Why is there such reluctance to tell parents what is going on?

But it doesn't matter where your child sits within a class...whether that be a class of 3 or a class of 30. It's incredibly dependent upon your child's class. It might be very bright, but in a class with two other very bright children. Suddenly, your child is at the bottom of that class. On the other hand, your child might be average, but in a class of 30 very weak children. Suddenly, it's very bright within the context of that class. Put the same child in any other class, and the perceived level of ability is suddenly very different.

While I was at secondary school, I was top of my class of 28. I then switched to grammar school and was hovering somewhere around the middle. I was still the same person, with the same level of ability. It's completely pointless to tell you where a child is "within a class". It does make more sense to tell parents how their child does in relation to age-related expectations.

I have in the past found it useful to ask which groups my DCs are in because it helps me to identify how they are doing compared to their peers. For example, if one of my DCs was in a top group one year and a bottom one the following year then I'd want to know what it was that they were finding difficult about that subject and if there was anything that I could do to help them. From now on I'll ask the teachers how my DCs are doing compared to national averages in addition to which groups they are in.

I should have added, I have never asked a teacher to tell me who else is in the same group as my DCs. I'm really not interested in how another child is doing, I just want to make sure my kids are not slipping behind.

Since there has only ever been a national expectation for Y2& 6 what do you propose teachers say in other year groups Jacob? Or would you like them to make something up?

mrz
first of all I didn't know that there were only national expectations for Y2&6
thanks for pointing that out
I wouldn't want teachers to make something up
so you say you can't say where dc is in the class because class ability depends on so many things
you can't compare dc with the nc because they do not exist for y3,4&5
is there anything you can say apart from dc is doing well for his/her ability for 3 years?
I still don't understand what the problem is
if my dc needs help with tables or reading or writing I want to know so that I may be able to help
this is just reiterating what cloutiedumpling is saying

Ability isn't static or across the board so this week the child who is most able writing a poem or identifying the properties of shapes might not be the most able next week when they need to write a newspaper article or interpret the information from a graph or table.
I can tell parents their child is very good at maths but they need to work on data handling or their child is very good at creative writing but needs to work on different writing genres especially information/persecution etc.
Knowing your child is the most able reader in the class isn't helpful if the class have low reading ability which means in a different class your child would be struggling to keep up with the bottom group ...

Come on Mrz you're being a tad disingenuous.

End of year expectations are available and very useful to parents.A parent having no idea their child is below national expectations until year 6 is appalling and not likely because schools are perfectly able to inform parents long before.

Ditto re the other end of the spectrum.

No I'm not being disingenuous I would be if I claimed that your Y1/3/4/5 child was working at/below/above national expectations as they didn't exist. In some schools the expectation for the end of Y1 might have been level 1B in another level 1A and in another 2C ... Far better to set individual expectations based on where the child is at the beginning of the year and where they should be at the end of the year ... Of course that means parents can't make comparisons with other children and need to focus on their own child .. Is that a bad thing"

So if a child isn't on coarse to get a 2b (or whatever the benchmark was) in year 2 Sats or a 4 in year 6 you can't let parents know beforehand and you don't think parents should know before they get that slip of paper when it's too late to do anything about it.

Wasn't two sub levels of progress between years a fairly standard expectation?

There aren't any sub levels or levels

In my class I would have been failing my children if my pupils made just 2 sub levels progress in a year

But the fact is the only national expectation was that children made two full levels progress over a Key Stage. Some schools chose to divide this by the number of years in each Key Stage but as we all know children develop in spurts whether in growth or learning!

Mrz
if the view is "as we all know children develop in spurts whether in growth or learning!" then the y2 & yc benchmarks are flawed as well
so is the view then that we wait until there is stable progress before we commit to saying anything?

No that isn't what I'm saying. My point is that a child might not make 2 sub levels progress one year but they might make more the next. Setting artificial (and remember sub levels never existed in the National Curriculum) linear expectations is contrary to everything we know about child development.