I don't know, and I'm struggling to imagine, any parent with a child DD's age who doesn't understand: a) the usual caveats, b) that a random bunch of children in one class may not be representative of the entire nation. There may be some worst cases beyond my imagination, but it does make me make me wonder about motives for assuming I’m one of them.
Targets vs. expectations is a fair point. DD’s targets of 9 are also the expectations because she is an outlier in those few subjects. Expectations not assumptions, because of caveats. One of the more pleasant consequences of life-after-levels here is that some of her targets seems to have stopped being entrenched in that RWM APS plus two sub-levels per year nonsense. We’re getting more of what some experienced thinky teachers actually think, not what computer says or school wants in larger scale data for Ofsted. I rarely bother sitting down with a subject teacher at parents’ evening, but did last time to in part to find out whether those stickers were there for Ofsted: I’d seen a few HMIs talk about being able to predict a lot about the school based on looking at the top, including Wilshaw near the end of their time in office.
I’ll skip justifying why I think ‘outlier’, except to say there are a 1001+ things supporting that and amongst them we have a few disinterested people recognising one of their own, and often based on very little evidence. Consider those serious university interviews where you’re largely sized up via reactions to one question, or at least I was back in the day.
It will be interesting to see where the 9 thresholds land, because they won’t be useful for anything much if they’re too rare (see also: KS2 SATS L6 Reading). I haven’t looked into this, but if someone has, then given the published formula do they have the wriggle room to nudge it from a too small proportion towards e.g. 3-5%?
Pretend it will be 3%. My premise is that there is a high probability that for some given subject a top 2% kind of child by previous and other measures has a high probability of being in the top 3% for any exam you make up tomorrow. Yes it is possible to make exams where everyone fails or you could fail to teach them large tracts of the syllabus, but in a more reasonable real-world, I think this is largely how it works. Note I picked 2% simply because it sometimes turns up in other folk's serious discusssions on what to do with 'em.
no-one gets full marks in everything" - would that be good?
Yes, it's very good.