I'm puzzled - any ideas?

[jeandawson]

DS in year 8 at local well regarded comp. Settled well last year and achieved well academically, is in top sets and has specific individual support for his maths due to his ability. He's on the school's 'high achieving students' programme, and is generally happy at school.
He's just brought his geography and history assessments home and has been graded lower than his starting point last Autumn - given Level 4b for both, when he ended Year 7 on 5a (maximum they give). Suddenly he's way off target, but at the same time he says he got the highest mark in the class.
There's a mismatch with his literacy in which he's levelled at 6a, and I would have imagined there should be some commonality across the humanities.
I've queried it as we're really puzzled, and he's very upset. Whilst I wait for some feedback from school does anyone have any clues as to what might be going on?
He doesn't have literacy problems, so that's not it, although I accept he's definitely stronger in maths and science. It occurred to me that school may be using a new grading system, but that's not it as his end of year targets are 6a based on last year's performance.
Any other ideas that I've not thought of?
Thanks in advance.

Maybe he just didn't do very well on those individual assessments. Maybe the teacher marked them more harshly than last year. Maybe it wasn't possible to achieve a higher level on those assessments.

Levels aren't a science. Expecting a coherence of levelling between years and teachers on small pieces of work is more than the system was designed for. That's partly why they are being scrapped.

I understand Noble, and to a large extent I agree. I'd rather focus on targets, but without any marking there haven't been any explicit ones to work on so it's levels or nothing.
I think I've worked out what's happened. The school had Ofsted in last week and all his books were looked at as part of the HAS project. Geography hadn't been marked all term, but miraculously was marked in full the day before the inspectors arrived .... complete with different font styles for different pieces of work and suddenly levels and targets appeared. To be fair to the teacher the work in his book is messy and not in full answers, and I wonder if his teacher had to rush to a judgement because of the inspectors.
Makes me cross, but don't we all play games?!
His assessment came home today and puts him at high level 6, which is more what we were expecting, and on a par with his English.