What's considered GDS rather than EXS? and how to work toward it?

[Pandadream]

I've recently become aware that the schoool is rating the children over the GDS, EXS and another one. The school hasn't said anything to me so far and I was thinking of asking for a meeting with DS's teacher to understand it better.

However, I was just wondering if anyone here know what is considered GDS vs EXS in terms of KS1, specifically Year 2. DS got Maths GDS. Writing and Reading EXS. I know this may sound competitive, but I do want to know what is required to be GDS and how I can support him.

If there are any workbook or specific learning resources that you may recommend, I would love ot hear them.

Thanks in advance!

Ex primary governor, the GDS and EXS are greater depth and expected progress marks, they can depend on what assessment schemes the school is using and are a moving benchmark. Children's progress isn't linear, especially in the earlier years, but as your DS is EXS and above you are already doing a great job.

In all honesty the best thing you can do to help your child in their education is to read with them every day, even if it's only for 10 minutes but if there are any areas your child needs help in a quick e-mail to their form tutor should give you a place to start. x

Our school provides a workbook for parents showing what greater depth writing looks like as against expected. Writing is the hardest one to nail.
I think in our school out of a class of 30, 15 got GDS for maths but only 2 for writing.

Maths is a bit like SPAG and Reading Comprehension. It's based on the answers they give to questions so you could look at past SAT papers from when they were sat in KS1 and see the difference.

For improvement, the best thing to do is read and discuss. Think about VIPERS (Vocab, Inference, Predict (what comes next), Explain, Retrieve and Summarise). Encouraging your child to read widely, beyond school texts and keeping a notebook of words to look up they don't understand or talk about with you is a good idea. Don't be worried about moving up through the book bands. We played games like Wordle, Lingo etc where they were exposed to wider vocab. Boggle and Scrabble are both good games. Bananagrams.

I still remember playing Boggle in a pub and my Year 2 DC got "Irate". The shock of the table next to us was brilliant. It's only because it's been our starting word in Wordle for about 3 years now 🤣

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2018-teacher-assessment-exemplification-ks1-english-writing

That website has the exemplification materials for writing, they also have them for reading.

As a PP said, those codes are standard assessment reporting: Greater Depth Standard, Expected Standard and Working Toward Standard. Achieving GDS in writing is particularly difficult (former year 2 moderator)

For both writing and reading development, reading a wide variety of genres, word games, spelling etc are best.

huge congrats on the maths gds! that is seriously hard to get in ks1, you should be well chuffed.

from what our teacher explained, gds isn't about doing "year 3 work", it's about "mastery". so not just knowing 2+2=4, but being able to apply that logic to a weird word problem or explain why the answer is 4. it's all about reasoning and deep understanding.

for reading/writing i'm useless (my son still thinks full stops are optional 😂) but for the maths side, we found a free app called capymaths really good for that "gds style" practice. instead of just pages of sums, it throws in these tricky challenge questions and logic puzzles that force them to really think. it adapts to them too, so if he's finding school work easy it will automatically stretch him without you needing to buy loads of workbooks.

might be worth a look to keep him challenged!