Lack of progress? Should I be concerned?

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Dd is in Y7. She finished primary with secure level 5 in Maths.

Secondary set her end of Y7 target as 5b. Last term's progress report assessed her as 5c, as did this term's progress report. Yet they also assess her as 'meeting expectations'.

In every other subject dd has made 1-3 sublevels progress, in some cases already meeting her end of year targets, so this seems out of pattern for her. The school obviously expect dd to do well, as half of her end of year targets are 6bs and 6as, so I'm puzzled that they have set such a low Maths target relative to her starting point.

So, what is going on? Is this something to be concerned about? I don't want to find, in a year or so's time, that her Science learning is being held back because her Maths isn't keeping up.

The big cynic in me (and bitter experience) knows that primary schools have a vested interest in the children appearing to have met government targets so not every child that arrives in secondary school with a secure level 5 is actually of that standard.

It sounds like you need to go and talk to her teacher. Have a chat to your daughter too...maybe there's a clash of personality or teaching style in maths, or even a distracting friend! Hopefully you can get to the bottom of the issue. I think you're right tk question what's going on.

The 5 is actually of that standard.

Sorry for the random ending...changed the order to make more sense and missed the last bit!

Sublevels are bollocks. The most likely reason that your DD was on a 5c last term and this term is because the teacher writing the report was deciding whether to bump her up a sublevel but then noticed that that would mean she was already meeting her end of year target so decided to save the bumping up for the next report.

The target may have been set from baseline assessments done at the start of school so although she may have got a secure 5 in her SATs, she may not have done so well on the baseline assessments.

The maths department may well do another proper assessment at the end of Y7 and get a more accurate level (which could be much higher than a 5b), but at the moment, the teacher is probably just making it up.

Schools pretend this stuff is meaningful, but it really isn't.

I am reading this with interest as my DD has a similar problem.

She was a competent Level 5c through the second half of Yr6 and gained a good score in the 11+ and passed for grammar school so I wasn't concerned about her maths ability at all.

But then she mucked up her SATS numeracy paper and only got a Level 4b!

At the start of Yr 7 at her grammar she was assessed as a Level 5c in their CAT test and was given a predicted level of 5a at the end of Yr 7.

So far she's been getting a few As and plenty of B+ for all of her maths homework. But we've just had her last set of tracking and she's still only a level 5c. She copes fine with homework but can't seem to cut it in the (many) maths test they do.

Not sure what to do

The term '5c' as it relates to individual pieces of work, little maths tests etc is meaningless. It really has no meaning. It's subjective nonsense. Sublevels don't officially exist. In a full SATs paper it can mean 'just scraped a level 5 when assessed properly on all topics' but otherwise someone, somewhere is making stuff up.

If your DD is doing well in class and homeworks but doing poorly on tests, then that is worth discussing with the teacher.

Thank you noble giraffe. She doesn't really have a flair for numbers but seemed competent enough. As she's at a grammar she only seems very average though she'd probably be flying at a regular comprehensive.

I have noticed that she seems to grasp the concept well enough and works things out properly. But then makes silly mistakes like adding up numbers wrong, so obviously the answer is wrong.

It's very frustrating.

Does "5c" mean she knows specific things/has specific skills defined in the curriculum, or is it the equivalent of a grade, like being marked a B+, for example?

Levels have topics/skils associated with them, so here are all the topics rated level 5 kangaroomaths.com/free_resources/assessment/bap/level5opaedia.pdf

If a student wants to move to a level 6, they have to learn new topics, which are rated level 6.

Saying a child got a level 5 in their SATs means that they sat a test which covered topics ranging from levels 3-5 and scored over a certain threshold. The level boundary between e.g. level 4 and 5 is sometimes divided into 3 and called 4c,4b,4a, so just scraped a level 4, in the middle, and nearly got the threshold marks for a level 5. That's it. A kid who scores a level 4 could technically get all the level 3 and level 5 questions right and none of the level 4 questions, so long as their total was between the score for a level 4 and a 5.

The problem with teachers levelling individual pieces of work, or tests that only cover a couple of areas is that it is meaningless when you compare it to the levels given by SATs. If a test only tests a couple of level 5 topics and the student gets them all wrong, is that student a level 4? Clearly not because they weren't asked any level 4 questions. How many do they have to get right to get a '5c' when the test is only covering a couple of level 5 topics? If they get them all right is that a 5a when the student might have no idea about the rest of the level 5 topics that weren't tested? If the test has one question which is a level 6 topic and the student gets it right, but messes up a level 5 question, are they a level 5 or a level 6?

Hopefully you can see that it's just being made up. Different schools will make it up in different ways. I, personally, lick my finger, stick it in the air and see which way the wind is blowing.

That is so right! My DC has never been confident in Maths, but managed a level 5 in Primary due to non stop 'booster classes' in Year 6, has trailed through secondary school feeling as if they are underachieving.......

That's pretty much what I thought, NobleGiraffe. I was grasping at straws with my question - if the number was equivalent to a grade, then staying the same might not matter.

noblegiraffe could I ask your advice please?

DD got her results from her latest maths test today. A Level 5b (after 3 5Cs in a row) so at least she's moving in the right direction as her EOY level should be a 5a.

But to get this 5b she scored 29 out of 50, and tells me that if she'd got 30/50 she would have moved up to a 5a?

The top score was 49/50 which only got her friend a Level 6c. One girl only got less than 12/50 and only got a 4b.

Can this be right? The marking seems very wide and diverse for just one maths paper?

The levels on that test are nonsense. They've probably looked at the questions on the test which I assume range from a level 4 to a level 6 (but only 1 level 6 question) and then divided the 50 marks up in the ratio of the levels, then further subdivided by 3 to get the a,b,c bit.

If it was an end of term test then this probably contained only a limited number of topics.

Compare this to a SATs paper which is 3 exams covering all topics and is out of 150.

You can see how arbitrary the sublevels are when 1 extra mark would represent an extra sublevel of progress since the last test, but when they were dividing the scores up to get the sublevels they probably could have chosen either 29 or 30 for the boundary.

The KS2 SATs (with it's quite critical role) covers 3c to 5a and that's 100 marks from fewer than 100 questions.

Y7 DD came home recently with an end-term maths score where the maximum was 45. There were three distinct sections in their test worth 15 marks each: one for L5, the second for L6 and the last for L7. She's top-set so it's testing a higher ability range, but that aside it sounds very similar and I imagine many school's routine assessments are roughly the same size in order to fit into one lesson.

In my day the extent of the information for parents was an end-year report where subject teachers scribbled something like '...resting on their laurels' and that was it. This is better, but pragmatically there probably isn't much of a 'business case' for spending more time on mid-year tests to make it more reliable.

KS2 "teach-to-test" does tend to be used as some universal explanation for Y7 progress stalling, but it is definitely not the reason for everything like this. Have you talked to your DD and perhaps the maths teacher about possible reasons for that run of 5Cs e.g. tried to get a useful answer to "What can she do to progress?"

KS2 SATs don't cover 3c to 5a, they cover level 3 to level 5. Sublevels don't officially exist, and the official KS2 result will only give a whole level.

We both know that the official story isn't the whole story i.e. Ofsted and RAISE Online exist. So do annual tables which map precise marks in that year's SATs to points, sub-levels and fine-points.

Here secondary turned DD's KS2 teacher assessment (sub-level granularity) for Writing into points and similarly for her precise SATs marks for both Reading and Maths. The average for all three was then mapped back to a sub-level and her end-Y7 target for most subjects is two sub-levels higher. The SATS SPaG result wasn't used. Pragmatically, KS2 SATs do produce sub-levels here and they have consequences for the child i.e. they are definitely not "just for the (primary) school" as some people claim.

Yes those sub-levels have all the murkiness you have mentioned, but I don't see a problem with using them to roughly indicate the proportion of the level (or levels in a wider ranging test) that a child has mastered.

The problem is that you think that a sublevel given as a proportion of a given test has any meaning when considered against the wider picture. What kind of level of accuracy are you expecting on a test that has been hastily cobbled together by overworked teachers and had some grade boundaries roughly made up for it?

Consider GCSE maths. They have expert exam setters who do it for a job. And yet still they can't decide on the grade boundaries until after the results are in and compared against what the cohort was roughly expected to achieve. If the experts can't write an exam and come up with accurate grade boundaries delineating the difference between a grade B and a grade A (and no sodding sublevels) then I'm pretty sure that the term 3 end of term test written by Mrs Smith isn't actually going to tell you whether a kid is really a 5c or a 5b. But there is a pretence that it can, and then you get parents worried because little Johnny, based on his test results, has made no progress. Or delighted because he has made a sublevel of progress. All over one dubiously assigned mark. And they don't actually tell you what little Johnny knows.

I'm glad levels are going!

That's why I said "roughly" and for "proportion" DD reeled off her specific marks for each section of her recent assessment. It didn't happen, but if she had done really badly in the L6 section but not the others then that would indicate something that I might have pursued. Rubbish test? DD has forgotten most L6? Another child stabbed her with a compass when she was doing that part?

In reality for her recent assessment I ended up asking her about a few other children's experiences because she got a shiny score and said it was "easy" i.e. I didn't know whether to be pleased by a sterling performance or dismayed by the lack of 'challenge' in a test that perhaps most sailed through.

I believe in error bars in places where many are either ignorant of their existence or wilfully ignore them (IQ and CAT scores instantly spring to mind) and have no hope of pin-point accuracy in this scenario, but schools are largely responsible for the data delusions. I don't care what Ofsted want, it doesn't mean they have to communicate with parents in those terms.

For my second Y7 parents' wotsit the very deliberate strategy was to swiftly interrupt the BS based around a big grid of subjects, targets, predictions, equally dodgy learning attributes... and talk about the actual child, not so much the data. That worked and in contrast with the autumn this one actually felt useful.

Rough would be giving a level. Giving a sublevel is implying accuracy and is a lie to parents and children.

I can't say, as a parent of 3 ds's, one still at school, that I've found much of the statistical data regarding levels or sublevels very edifying. When oldest ds was in secondary his year group contained a larger than usual number of very able mathematicians so they had a "higher than than the norm" top set.

The trouble with that, from the school's point of view, was that they made too much progress too early so by the end of KS3 some children might be viewed as "stagnating" even thought they would still be at the top end of was expected. I gather the official line on children's learning is that they all have to make steady progress throughout their school life/each day/each lesson.

In Yr 8, ds came home one day very proud of the level he'd been told he had in his exam. Next day the class were told there was an error and they were all being marked down. Ds had scored 100% on the test and after regrading he still had 100%. I strongly suspect someone had a panic that this class wouldn't be seen to be making enough progress in Yr 9 if the true Yr 8 figures were recorded. So they all had to be recorded as doing slightly worse. Came across similar situations with ds number 2 when he was at secondary. Cannot prove it but it happened often enough for me to strongly suspect it to be true.

"Giving a sublevel is implying accuracy and is a lie to parents and children."

That's a fair point i.e. I've seen enough parents blindly assuming precision. That said they were much more accurate at primary, it's secondary Y7 where I've learnt not to take anything much at face value.

The Y5 primary teacher I know typically endeavours to mark today's work that evening all the better for differentiation tomorrow i.e. have their finger quite firmly on the pulse of their class. They have also described how they carve up a level into various parts (topics) and how they decide a child is 'secure' with any given part, which all seemed rational enough. DD's teachers in upper-KS2 were much the same and as a measure of relative progress with a given whole level, those a, b, c sub-levels worked for me.