Another English struggler (yr 7)

[SpottyHamster]

DS2 (yr 7) was gutted to get a D for English in his interim report. He got As and Bs for everything else (except German, C) . He got level 5 in yr 6. He is a prolific reader, av speller but has poor handwriting. Vocab and understanding good and he got an A for a history essay. At a loss as to why he did badly (for him) really, he wasn't aware he was having problems. Will TRY to contact Eng teacher next term , not easy, and the parents eve not until late march. Does anyone know what sort of things do they do at this level, and where the common pitfalls are?

Send a note in with DS - in his planner if he has one - and ask the teacher to telephone you. I'm sure this is just an error, my son got the same this year (Year 8)and I'm not worried.

It may have been that the grade went off just one or two pieces of assessed work. I'm a TA & we did a couple of assessed pieces with Yr7 but as they were reading & writing assessments in a different format to maybe what they were used too, most of the grades were down compared to what was expected.

I think the D may well be an effort grade as Key stage 3 are graded in Levels. I teach English and find many Year 7s are totally turned off English due to the pressure of Key Stage 2 SATs. Please don't worry about this.