Can someone help me decipher dds yr5 school report.

[Callmegeoff]

Dds s school has finally done away with levels.

In her last report she hadn't made any progress from the end of year 4 remaining at levels 3a/3b in all subjects.

Her new report is just assessing her at maths and English, with a number of tick boxes, most of her ticks are in the competent level, a few apprentice and none in the expert level. Would competent translate to level 4? Does any one else have this style of report?

Her teacher says she has progressed do I trust that she has?

Dd does have a mild learning difficulty -dyslexia. I'm wondering whether to get a tutor over the school holidays.

I think stamina to read all that might be an issue for some children

The non-fiction part of the second paper wasn't too bad. The fiction piece is just a huge wall of text, and not the easiest text for a lot of children, whilst trying to manipulate a separate answer booklet. I can see a lot of children giving up before they've even started.

Yes some will take one look and give up

The SPAG is a wordy load of bollocks as well, lots of children will need help just to wade through.

And the definitions of exclamations/questions are laughable.

michaelt1979.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/when-is-a-question-not-a-question/

Having read the instructions children should be given the opportunity to sit paper 2 but can be stopped when necessary for individual children if they are struggling. I'm sure that will make them feel better.

It's good to know that should the fire alarm go off in the middle you should stop the test. Just in case you weren't quite sure which order your priorities should be in.

callmegeoff

I have one in Year 5 and they take mock SATs 3X a year. They send the tests home. You can ask the school if they used them as some schools do.

They don't any more - because they are not matched to the new cue. So there would be no point. It's like comparing apples and oranges, using strawberries as levels

There are a few schools still sticking their fingers in their ears and giving out meaningless info though.

Curriculum, obviously. Not cue.

Did they do that this year , proud mama? Because the curriculum has changed completely so any result you get off what is presumably the previous few years year 6 SATS is going to be fairly meaningless.

My dd has done the year 5 mock Sats 3-5 levels this week,have pointed out to the governors and SMT over and again that we need info on the new to no avail.

They haven't replied once.

X posts with Feenie.

Mind you if they're using the optional says papers they were fairly meaningless under the old system too. They weren't the most accurate of papers for levelling.

I would say the older Year 5 SATs were pretty much obsolete anyway - the first one was 18 years old, fgs!

Cross posts again, Rafa!

They were used to provide a false sense of security for parents who didn't know any better, I think. Came believe some schools are trying to get away with that still though!

You tell 'em, Lily.

Rafa

They did. The school uses the Year 6 old test papers starting in year 5. They take 5 mock sats before the end of Year 6.

I wouldn't describe it as apples and oranges. the new SATs definitely have some differences(aligning with changes in new curriculum) but not drastically different in format

Our year 5 teachers once gave the optional reading sat and the previous years ks 2 sat on consecutive days. Only about 2 children out of 45 got the same sub level on both. The optional one over levelled fairly consistently.

There was a thread the other week where a child had got 4a in his maths sat and had then sat a test on entry to yr 7 which levelled him as 6b. So he was set an end of year target of 7c. Unsurprisingly he missed it by a considerable amount and ended up a 5b. Which is where you'd expect him to be if he'd been a 4a on entry.

But it's the differences in curriculum that are important, not so much the format.

It would be possible to get a reasonable score on the ks2 sat and still not have met the standard now expected at the end of year 5. Which means a child could in theory end up having to spend yr 6 covering the year 5 stuff and some yr6 stuff and not meet the expected standard in the test at the end of the year.

I don't know much about the optional, but given that past Year 6 SAT test papers results are standardised - must be why the school opts to use only these as they can be compared between different cohorts - must be pretty safe to track progress for the same cohort one NC Year to the next.

I looked at one of the comparisons I think on the TES website for Maths only and it didn't seem the new curriculum was that drastically different. there was less probabality stats -can't remember the rest.

I did think the earlier NC Years - year 3 seemed much more difficult.

It would be possible to get a reasonable score on the ks2 sat and still not have met the standard now expected at the end of year 5

take your point on that. probably wouldn't know this for my ds .

This is where the problem is really. A child leaving year 4 on 3b last year would have been roughly were you'd expect an 'average' child to be. But they are entering year 5 to start the new year 5 curriculum with some significant gaps that the new curriculum assumes has been taught in yrs 3-4. They'll need to cover that before they can start on the next steps.

It's as much about changes to the order in which things are taught as the actual difficulty of the concepts. I think they've massively narrowed what they will accept as correct method for method marks as well. Which isn't going to help a lot of children.