Y10 and GCSE targets

[Lucyccfc68]

Hi.

DS is in Y10 and got his GCSE targets recently. He was really disappointed as the school have predicted 7 in maths and 6 in everything else. School have said they have done this based on his primary school SATS results and not his achievements from Y7 - Y9. He finished Y9 with school assessing him working at 7's in all subjects except for English, which was 6.

All this is quite new and he feels that his targets should be what school feel he is capable of getting and not based on his SATS. He thinks that school will just settle for him getting grade 6's and not support or encourage him to do better.

Could it be that school have done this, so it makes them look good when he gets higher than 6's as it shows the distance travelled from his SATS?

Thanks

As everyone else has said, don’t pay too much attention to the targets. I had kids in my class last year who had a target of 4 who got 7s and one with a target of a 5 who got a 9. Any school with any sense will be pushing him to achieve the best grade possible regardless of this target as there will also inevitably be some who miss their target grades, sometimes by quite a bit. The year before last I had a student with a target of a 7 who got a 2. It was quite a sad case really but her life had taken a bit of a downwards spiral in the five years since she’d finished primary school.
We set our targets high (we set them so that every child achieving their target would give a progress 8 score of roughly +0.7) and there are still plenty of kids who exceed theirs. A lot can change in 5 years!

Sorry for the bass spelling above, autocorrect and my fault for not rereading.. The targets are BS it was meant to read, and as I said the schools receive them from elsewhere, not make them themselves, so they are not at fault
here. Once your son actually does something in his course, like tests, mock exams etc, teachers will usually give him their own predictions eventually based on these.

Targets are set by SAT not teachers. Predictions are pointless as it's down to the alchemy of teacher, pupil attitude to learning and, sometimes, luck of the, questions on the day. I say which band (5 to 6 or 7 to 8) I have seen evidence of but I won't be drawn on someting more concrete.

One of the big problems with Targets is that schools use so many different methods. Our school uses FFT (Fisher Family Trust) 5 , which means if all our students meet our targets it would put us in the top 5% for similar schools across the country. There are also other ones they do , FFT 20 , FFT 50. Depending on which one is used depends on if the target is designed to be met by most kids , of if it's a really aspirational target. There are of course other methods of setting targets too. That means you can't really have a discussion on targets for a particular school without knowing the actual method of creating them. As previous people have said targets have no impact on P8 scores, as that's purely a measure of KS4 achievement against KS2 results.

*I have twins - the difference in homework and lesson content is huge

They are left to rot*

There is a huge difference in homework and lesson content in my son's Set 5 English class than there is in his friend's Set 1 class.

The difference being that if you gave my son that level of work he would crumble. In fact at his previous school he did crumble. Now, with the ability to work at a slower pace and not get confused by concepts too advanced for him he is on course to pass with a Grade 4/5 rather than fail completely (his previous prediction was Grade 2)

We do the same in the school where I work - targets are set from KS2 SATs to aim at an overall average P8 for the school.

However we don't communicate these targets to students, they are for teachers use only. We don't give students a target at all. Students are encouraged to reach the highest level they can without limit. Our school has excellent results, and it is not selective or grammar.

There is a huge difference in homework and lesson content in my son's Set 5 English class than there is in his friend's Set 1 class
Exactly!
It's not leaving a class to rot by giving them appropriately structured and differentiated work.