Year 7 target GCSE grades

[OrtIrect]

Looking for some advice. My summer born, recently ADHD diagnosed child has just started year 7 and their first report includes predicted GCSE grades as a ‘target’. They are all 4s and 5s. Basically, if they got these grades, in the area we live in, they wouldn’t have the option of a levels as they are not sufficient for the local 6th form college. It may well be that this isn’t the route for them anyway but their reading age (as measured by school) is over +2 years over his chronological age and they are already rated as one or two grades above target after less than one term based on actual attainment. I’m confused and concerned about how best to help him and how to manage his expectations as he talks about university. I have an uneasy feeling that he will be a ‘box check’ pupil ie on track for exceeding very modest targets. He is currently awaiting medication for the adhd. Can anyone advise or share similar experiences?

Thanks all. Really appreciate the responses.

I’ve honestly no idea how they came up with this poor kid’s target - I began to suspect someone had written his SATS for him. My HOD (she was new) was outrageous, though, repeatedly demanding that his coursework had to be an A (it was expected to be one grade above the target) when everyone in the school, including the child, knew that would never happen unless I wrote it for him!

Its all bollocks. They are based on sat scores and bare little relevance to actual gcse results but are a stick to beat teachers with sadly

As parents, we want to see the statistics showing a school has good results and good progress scores...

But we don't want our children to be seen as data points.

I know that my DD hates seeing the report on how far "behind" her English scores are... based on a target inflated by her Maths score (similarly, she appears to over achieve in Maths and Science...)
I'm dreading DD2s first report as she did really well in her SATs and I'm worried her target grade will appear terrifying and unreachable. She's smart... but has perfectionist tendencies so if the stats say she's supposed to get 8s, she will obsess about not getting 8s.

It would be so much easier without this constant data.

I'm dreading DD2s first report as she did really well in her SATs and I'm worried her target grade will appear terrifying and unreachable.

We had exactly this with my DD. Her KS3 reports all came back peppered with "working below expectations" despite her doing really excellently. In one subject she'd actually got 100% in everything apart from 1 assessment where she'd dropped 2 marks. It turned out that it was impossible to be "working at expectations" in some subjects because the teachers wouldn't commit to high grades at GCSE when DD was so far off.

Result was one extremely demoralised child, the school refused to see our point and wouldn't change the way they did reports, so we told DD to ignore the targets and just focused on attainment and effort.

For OP- it can be useful to not have stellar targets :)

Maybe he has a huge potential and is doing very well in the classroom. Just not that effective at homework. MIne is like that. It takes him hours and hours to do homework. Because most of that time he is not doing it.lol

Er nope. Kid was just very weak. Clearly something had gone a bit wrong at Primary stage (
confused him with another child, perhaps? 🤣)

My son was "greater depth" in all of his SATs but his secondary school told me his targets were 5/6. This was in year 7. He did his GCSEs last summer and all were grade 7+.
Frankly I'd take what they are saying at the beginning of year 7 with a huge pinch of salt.

DDs school has only just let us have predicted and target gcse grades. She's in year 11 ...

The target grades will not influence the final gcse predicted grades. And your child has a lot of years of school left to improve. I have a y12 who got put in the bottom set for maths in Y7. But they ended up getting a 9 in GCSE maths. So don’t worry about it just yet.

That's roughly the same as my sons SATs scores (105 spag, 109 maths and reading) and he achieved all 4s and 5s in his GCSEs. Obviously with hard work, yours could do better.

My DD and DE have this on the bottom of the reports. It's based on SATS for them and predicted scores if they stay at the same level. They will always move up and down it's just a guide :)