Care needs to be taken when talking about this across schools as different schools are doing different things.
Some schools will have some sort of flightpath, as this is sort of similar to national curriculum levels as schools were familiar with levels.
Some schools will just be dealing in words, i.e. "good progress, satisfactory progress"
Some schools will just be providing effort grades.
Some schools will be providing a score towards the end of Y7, or KS3 curriculum and not neccesarily linking this to GCSE outcomes at this stage.
Schools don't know what the new GCSE grades really look like yet, and they certainly don't know what that should translate to in year 7 or year 8. So all the methods mentioned above are problematic.
So what each school will probably be doing is providing some sort of score/grade, or description of your son or daughters progress. This is very likely not to be translatable, to a student with a score in another school.
What you will probably find is that schools are introducing more testing, probably at the end of year. This might give a better indication.
I would focus on where they are now, and what skills and knowledge they need to progress. I wouldn't worry about where they are going in Y7, it's a long way away.
In the OP example, as effort and behaviour is good, then they student should be making good progress, as long as the school have defined the curriculum appropriately. Don't worry about the numbers.