Need help interpreting first Yr 7 interim report - levels/targets

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Dd has brought home her first interim report in Yr 7 which consists of a column which shows the level she is currently working at; a column which shows her target for the end of Yr7;effort & a column for concerns. There is a key for the effort & concern codes & from those, I can see that she is putting in an excellent effort & that there are no concerns. Whilst that is brilliant, I'm having trouble deciphering the levels. She is working between level 4/5 with targets of 6b for most things, however, French & German she is working at 2b & 2c respectively with a target of 5a in both by the end of the year. Presumably, this is because MFL are new subjects to secondary (though she did get a bit of French at primary)? How can they predict an increase of 3 levels in a year, and what is an average level at the end of Yr 7 please?

Our school told us at parents eve to ignore end target levels for mfl as they were not always achievable. If your child is working well & progressing in line with expectations, don't worry. At this age, levels are easier to jump from 2 to 5 because children have the rounded abilities to apply to their learning. My daughter jumped 2-3 levels really quickly in a couple of subjects she had never studied before. It's a good thing when the school has high expectations of their teaching

Thanks Flumps, that's reassuring to hear. The accompanying letter said school had changed the format of the reports to be more in line with the levels people were used to from primary but a bit more guidance would have been welcome!

My daughters actual level history for MFL - level she achieved at the end of each year:

Y7 2a
Y8 4b
Y9 5c

That (and whatever other data they use) 'predicted' her a GCSE Grade E

Yr11 GCSE Grade C achieved

So, they do indeed start low and move up quite fast, especially to be in the higher grade ranges at the end.

Agree with others. 4 weeks in (allowing for all the information to be gathered and collated and printed and got out to parents, the teachers will have had to give their assessments a little while ago) then they will be really low in a totally new subject, but I've been staggered with the amount of MFL my dd picked up. They have strong, confident teachers, and she picked up a lot of French in Yr7. They then added in German in Yr8, and by the end of Yr8, she was the same level in both languages.

Working between level 4/5 with a target of 6b by the end of the year sounds wrong. 2 sublevels progress is a usual target. Are you sure those targets aren't for the end of KS3?

The accompanying letter says:
The Maths & English targets for the end of the year are two sub levels higher than your child's English & Maths KS2 SATS scores. For all other subjects, we have worked out what grade your child is likely to get in Year 11 based on their KS2 SATS scores & then tracked back to where they should be at the end of Year 7 to indicate that they are making good progress.

So, I'm unclear tbh - I'm interpreting that they are all end of Yr 7 targets???

That was meant to be a confused smiley rather than a sceptical one!

That sounds utterly bonkers. They have predicted what results your DD should be getting in 5 years time (for a GSCE that will no longer exist) then used this to track back 4 years to the end of Y7 to make a prediction, despite those predictions looking very ambitious given the KS2 starting point, which is much closer to the end of Y7 than GCSE.

Bin 'em. What a load of bollocks.

FWIW you are right about the reason for the low level of working for MFL, but I do think that 5a would be a spectacularly high level at end of year 7 - you would need to have very good mastery of the past tense to reach that which most secondaries don't attempt in yr 7. How many lessons of MFL does she have a week?

Average level for MFL at end of year 7 would be a 4c for an able student, a level 3 for an average student IME. I teach MFL btw, hence waffling on about that!