Reception Assessment Gradings

[Spacemonkey2016]

Are any Reception teachers able to answer this for me: are the gradings for EYFS end of year assessments only emerging and expected now or is there an exceeding too? I know things changed a lot this year.

Only emerging and expected now with the new EYFS.

Is there a particular rationale for this? Seems limiting to me not to be able to identify if children are stronger in some areas/across the board so that input can be planned accordingly. Dd's first school only really seemed to worry about getting children to expected and then they were left to flounder a bit - understandably when looking at the resources and struggles that they had in all honesty. But a worry that other schools might use this as somewhere thay they can save resources when budgets, as ever, are so stretched.

Ah thanks for the quick response. The reason I was asking because for my son's mid year report, he was marked at expected for all levels. However, he really is very good at Maths, so I was expecting him to be exceeding at that, but his teacher said they don't give exceeding anymore. I thought she was just finding a polite way of letting me know that whatever I think he can do at home, he doesn't demonstrate at school 🤣

I’ve no idea what the rationale behind it is, although in practise it does mean more time to focus on the children who a struggling. My more able children do still get challenged though because that’s my job! There should also be a discussion with year 1 teachers to identify the more able pupils.

It was confusing last year as there was no exceeding on the table of the report.
I did expect dc might have exceeded in something as they are a CSA start..

Personally i prefer gradings. 1a etc for reading or maths. Met not met etc is very broad.
Dc2 is still only on green band at 7 and i think a more specific category would be better.

I mean i know why. Its a mix of
-school being controlling. They want every book read 3 times.

• Not assessing levels often or allowing skipping.
• Lockdowns in yr r with 0 books
• So other kids who were in would be 8w ahead
• When we went back we still covere those books and didnt move on for about 9m even though dc knew those sounds in jan 21.

Annoyingly school think its me not reading enough with dc but ive wanted to read the right books.

• Dc is very stubborn and school kept encouraging sounding out so now dc cant read fluently (probably to do with the phonics test.

This is my dc2 i know what im doing and just want control of the books. I almost wrote i want them to stop listening to dc because dc then wounded out even more.
I probably need to blame ofsted for this insanity of reading 3 times. It probably does increase fluency for some kids but to enforce it, we have clubs 4/7 days so reading a book 3 times in that time is hard, well impossible really.
What we could do is read a b7 or 8 and get 20+ pages of that done on one day.
Dc2 is definitely finding this harder than dc1 because dc1 was pretty much gifted at reading and only needed to be told a sound once. But dc2 is doing so much worse than she should and i dont think its the teacher its the ta (who wants to help) but its just been a really bad fit.
We've had a lot of issues with dc1 too and a lot of sickness and frankly dc2 now t reading on a specific day has been the least of my worries.

Ideally i want to switch to reading my choice of books but we just cant fit in the time. And actually i tried to do that.
But i think we are nearly ready for a jump up a few bands (have started the project x band 7 so that may be now.
Th online books would have solved this.
Im going to be peeved when dc gets not met for reading for y1

We haven’t had our reports yet, but it’s a bit of a shame to effectively only get a met/not met.

Based on the reports we got at the school nursery, I expect we’ll also get a narrative (presumably the best fit from a standard sentence bank) and hopefully the genuine free-form comments from the teacher and head as well.

DfE make the decision on the gradings, there is no option for exceeding now.