Reports and new levels

[icecreamvan]

DD is in reception and the Expected and Exceeding etc are all written into her report. But for DS they haven't given him a level/expected etc for anything. He's in Year 4.
The teacher said today that they don't give them to anyone.
Is this right? Surely parents should be given some idea of how their children are progressing?

Our school have given below, towards, at and at greater depth than age related expectation. But even that isn't great, because my dts are young in their year, so are they working towards their actual age or their year group age, given that they are the 2nd and 3rd youngest in the year group.

I started another thread about feeling that ds had gone backwards because he had gone from 'expected' in YrR to 'working towards' in Yr1. But at a meeting I requested I was told that working towards is not the same as working below, and that the expectation levels are roughly a year higher than before, so a child who is meeting the levels is actually doing really well and working towards means that they have secured some but not all of the 10 or so requirements for a particular level.

Confusing, isn't it?

Age related expectations relate to all children in a given year group, regardless of their actual age.

The descriptors your school is using are the same ones that are statutory for reporting in Y2 and Y6.

We use descriptors that match the statutory ones.

However, it does feel as if they are 'founded in jelly', because our decisions about where the 'edges' of each descriptor are are just that - our decisions. We may get better at this with time because the actual KS2 results will start to give us some indication of how many of a typical cohort might be expected to be at each level (large school, so this is not totally invalid in a statistical sense).

I personally would like to know:-
Are they progressing at an appropriate rate
Are they painful to have in the school
What the next big thing they need to work on is.

All I get is an effort grade (which everyone I have spoken to got the middle grade -good- for everything) for every subject and below/at/exceeds age-related expectations for maths, reading and writing. If DS can get a "good" effort grade for PE then frankly I would hate to see what "fair" effort looked like... DD2 got "good" effort for computing despite having missed every lesson!

Our school reports have age expected..Below or above....