Year 7 grades

[SeraOfeliaFalfurrias]

Hi all, I'm trying to figure out DD1's report. I don't get the UK education system at the best of times, but DD1 is now in secondary, and of course they're using the new 9-1 GCSE system. I understand that the grade she gets is what they would expect her to achieve if she were to sit the GCSE today. And I get that the target grades are individual for each child, so whether she is above, at or below target applies to her own target, not that of her peers. But what it doesn't tell me is how she is doing relative to the other children in her year. She might be doing as expected for her, but be at the bottom of the year or the top of the year and I'd be none the wiser!

Because the system is new there's not much help on the internet to find out what is a good/average/bad grade in year 7. I suppose I'm only supposed to care if she's achieving her own full potential but stuff that, I want to know if she's keeping up with her peers.

Can anyone shed any light?

And yes I would find it useful to get results for the year. If lots of children were getting 6/7 in English and he got a 3 I'd be concerned. But if his score was fairly average that's more ok. He was a high level 5 in English in sats so should be achieving and the school he's at tends to fall down on English results hence my worry.

I ask DS 12, for his test mark then work it out as a %. Also ask what other classmates got in his set , as he seems to know. Gives me as good an idea as anything as to how he's doing in the scheme of things at this stage. Bit more meaningful than 'target' numbers which are just best guesswork.

Also ( sorry to go on) if he level 3 was low in the year I'd want to be contacting school to see what went wrong and how we can help him. I sound like a pushy parent. I'm not but English was the one thing he excelled in at primary and is his lowest mark.

Ds got a Grade 4 in his English this year - he normally gets a grade 7 or above. I asked him why he thinks he got that mark, because it was clear he wasn't very happy with it. He was asked to write about someone he really admired - he said that he doesn't really admire anyone, so he couldn't answer the question!!!!!

That's funny Blanketdog! Yes my da was very disappointed with his level 3 and so I'm not sure how to approach it.

glad it's not just me that finds this system confusing.

Wow. I hope it's just that DD's school has set the grades out differently to some of the posters above. Because by the sounds of things 2s and 3s are low, and as I said, she's bright and top set so I expect her to be doing well. She won't be top of the form, but she should be achieving well and on track for grades that will get her into a top 6th form college and a good university.

The thing is that she can be quite lazy, so I don't know if I need to be pushing her to make more effort, or whether she's. The teachers have hundreds of students, so even if they rank her effort as good, that doesn't mean they know her well enough to know if she's coasting even if she seems engaged in class.

This is how the school says they work out the targets:

"The target grades are generated from information provided by the Fischer Family Trust, an independent charity which supports education in the UK. These targets represent an estimate of the average progress made by students with the same Key Stage 2 scores in the top 20% of schools."

It's all bollocks . God the education system is in free-fall at the moment. Dd is in year 7 too. I am so fed up with her assessments just being graded with 'expected' because she is essentially unable to achieve 'above expected' within the confines of the year 7 syllabus because she's very able. It's so de-motivating. I'd rather she got a 1-9 grade (even though that's spurious too). It's not really school's fault though - they are trying to make the best of there being no sensible system to follow.

I've just emailed DD's head of year to see if he can shed any light. Grrr, stupid bloody system. Have we got a new Minister for Education yet? And if so, dare I hope that they're vaguely competent?

These targets represent an estimate of the average progress made by students with the same Key Stage 2 scores in the top 20% of schools."

FFT are working blind this year. Their targets are usually the average GCSE grade that a student with the same KS2 score as your kid achieved when Y11s sat their GCSEs last year (or your school is using the GCSE grade that would put your kid in the top 20%). The problem is that Y7 have got KS2 scores that no one else has ever got before and FFT are using them to generate GCSE targets for GCSEs that no one has sat yet. Their target grades change each year when the results for Y11 come in, so the target grades are going to change quite a lot when they actually have some real data to work with. Schools really shouldn't be giving FFT grades to parents, especially this year as they are junk.

Interesting. I'd prefer it if school was honest and said they had no idea!

OP-
2/3 now is fine because she won't have covered material that is 4-9 in difficulty.

Dd is in year 8. We are given her end of term exam scores, and average score of tests which is given a grade equvilant and then an effort score. I pay most attention to the effort score so I kno if dd is working hard. As a pp said the dc can only do their best. If dd is not achieving that then it's my business to ensure she pulls her socks up. Why would you need to know where your dc is in comparison to the rest of the class. Even in streamed subjects you are going to get differing abilities.

Sorry I meant to add why do people need a predicted grade ffor GCSE results in year 7 or 8. The exams are three or four years away at this point and anything could happen.I would imagine most teachers get a feel for thirst scores in year 9 onwards.

We are not looking forward to Y7 grades of Ds2. Find out from Monday. Eng and Maths are concerning, followed by French and History. We were selective in our revision, and tried to prioritise rather than boil the ocean on revising all subjects.

I do find the term"flight path", quaint and charming. Though, I think our flight path is on a not so high altitude flight path. Fingers-crossed.

Minister for education is Justine Greening, it didn't change.

At least yours revised, portico, DD1 didn't bother telling us she had exams until she was halfway through. I despair of her, she has no motivation to push herself at all. Which is why I want to know how she is doing relatively, so I know how big of a fire I need to light under her butt.

SeraOfelia
If your DD has no motivation dont you need to deal with it regardless of how good she is doing relative to other people at school. And cant you just ask the teachers at parents night your questions? A number on a page seems to be pretty irrelevant at this stage. And from what little I know a bright child is supposed to be getting a 7/8 at GCSE a nine is for the super bright.

DD's school have E(expected), A (above) and B (below expected). Which is even more meaningless.

I asked one of the teachers last parents evening about it but she didn't make things clearer. IMO an E could be either "she's great at this subject, and doing really well as Expected" OR 'she's crap at it and doing really badly as Expected '! Totally pointless.

We want to know how well she's doing compared to her peer group so that we can provide extra support if necessary.

I think the DfE will have to step up at some point and introduce a national system to replace levels. The Tory manifesto said 'more accountability at KS3' but at the moment there can't be any accountability at KS3 because there's nothing to measure anything with.

If you look at the Suffolk Maths website they show correlations between KS3 levels, to legacy gcse grades, to 9-1 grade levels

www.suffolkmaths.co.uk/pages/SoW/1StudentKS3-4%20Revision.htm

Except it's not correct. They have missed off G grade GCSE. New grade 1,2 and 3 cover the kids who would have got G,F,E,D. At the top end it's not 7=A, 8=A and 9=A. 7 is a low to middle A, 8 covers high A as well as low A and 9 is high A*. They've fudged it to make it nice and neat.

Also they've got a list on the right side linking topics to GCSE grades. That's not how it's supposed to work any more! Any topic could be asked in a grade 9 way, technically.

Hi noble. It's not a great table. I realise it's too soon to gauge grade boundaries, but it's as good as I can find on the Web. I use it really to correlate ks3 levels to legacy gcse grades

I take issue with "expected" grades. My dcs are summer born, to catch up with their autumn born peers they need to make more progress than their autumn born peers, but that increased expected level of progress is not built into the system. They are not expected to catch up, they are expected to continue to under perform - the summer born kids are assessed as if they were at the same development as their autumn peers. My ds has consistently over achieved, he started at an extremely low level - he now at Year 9 sits in the top set, the levels and target setting have been so utterly useless for him, when it comes down to a personal level what relevance do they have to any student?