YEAR 5 QCA TESTS - WHAT DO THE RESULTS MEAN????

[tokyonambu]

Our experience suggests that the standard is so low that a reasonably bright 9-year-old can comfortably exceed national expectations for 11-year-olds.

So what's your point? The national expectations are just that: all children who do not have a substantial learning impairment should be able to reach that standard. "A bright child can do that years earlier" is missing the point entirely: those national expectations are the level below which schools that have a substantial number of pupils need to have a damned good excuse to avoid being placed in special measures. Distributions have tails, and the expectation is a floor; it's not even the "average", it's the level below which (loosely) every child should be assumed to be potentially statement-able.

That there's two years' attainment difference between that and the brightest (and let's not point out that year 6 pupils may be two years older than year 5 pupils) is hardly news, and not something that parents of children fortunate enough to be in the upper range of that should be smug about. 4b should be accessible to EAL / ESOL pupils who were born two months prematurely on the last day of August who have been moved three times as their parents were posted by work; if your child who doesn't have those issues can do better, that's entirely to be expected.

What the national expectations do is stop schools shrugging their shoulders and saying "ah well, EAL, August, premie, what do you expect?", but instead force them to provide the resources to attempt to deal with those disadvantages. And quite right too.

[tokyonambu]

Well - I never knew that. If over half the children are getting a level 5 in reading does that mean that the levels should be reassessed - or that schools are vastly underacheiving in other areas or that it's all a silly waste of time?

Again, what's your point? The intent of SATs (insofar as there is an intent, after all the politicing) is to ensure that schools provide a decent level of education so that there's some level of accountability. They're not there to give pushy parents something to boast about at dinner parties. The 5a grade is clamped at the top, so there are a substantial number of people who would do better if the scheme had those grades available.

But so what? The purpose is to indicate schools are doing their job, and as no-one apart from Osfted cares about KS2 SATs there's no need to worry about grades above the threshold (it's worth marking 5 to provide some confidence intervals on the 4b). That is why parents obsessing about them to the point of buying revision books and tutoring is so bizarre: no one, not even the vast majority of secondary schools, pays the slightest attention to them. There were (indeed, may still be) optional "level 6" SATs papers: how desperate for approval as a parent would you have to be to think that mattered?

[scarlett]

It does matter to some people.My son has just sat a level 6 paper and although I have better things to be doing at dinner parties then to bore everyone rigid with my sons achievements, privately I am so pleased and proud because not so long ago he wasn't doing so well and both of us have worked hard..his self esteem has consequently soared as well.There's nothing wrong with that.

Please don't tell me off.

[MoJo]

The sats results are also very important because they are used to set the children in year 7. I for one are very pleased my child will be sitting a level six too. It will get him a head start at senior school. And I am reassured to know he will be with children of the same standard as him .

[push-pull-mum]

Well - I never knew that. If over half the children are getting a level 5 in reading does that mean that the levels should be reassessed - or that schools are vastly underacheiving in other areas or that it's all a silly waste of time?

Again, what's your point? The intent of SATs (insofar as there is an intent, after all the politicing) is to ensure that schools provide a decent level of education so that there's some level of accountability. They're not there to give pushy parents something to boast about at dinner parties. The 5a grade is clamped at the top, so there are a substantial number of people who would do better if the scheme had those grades available.

But so what? The purpose is to indicate schools are doing their job, and as no-one apart from Osfted cares about KS2 SATs there's no need to worry about grades above the threshold (it's worth marking 5 to provide some confidence intervals on the 4b). That is why parents obsessing about them to the point of buying revision books and tutoring is so bizarre: no one, not even the vast majority of secondary schools, pays the slightest attention to them. There were (indeed, may still be) optional "level 6" SATs papers: how desperate for approval as a parent would you have to be to think that mattered?

I only ever went to one dinner party in my life - and that was in about 1991 - long before I had any children to push or boast about. Funnily enough - not all concerned parents are middle class and certainly not all of them are pushy or boastful. These tests provide data which is held on record about our children and may effect how they are educated right the way up to age 16 plus. I think it is only sensible to want to know what these statistics mean - and I don't think parents should be insulted (all be it by implication) for asking for advice on the subject.

My 'point' as you put it is that surely the tests are meant to be standardised so that a child is no less likely to meet or exceed a target in Reading than in Maths or Writing. If there is such a large discrepancy between the levels reached in Reading and the levels reached in other areas, might it not be a good idea to re-consider what those target levels should actually be?

[tokyonambu]

The sats results are also very important because they are used to set the children in year 7

In fact, in many authorities they're barely used for that, which is why the boycott has had almost no effect. Grammars don't use them, because they've got their admission test results to use. Comps might use them for a few weeks, but after that use NFER tests, which have a demonstrable correlation with GCSEs and provide much richer data.

These tests provide data which is held on record about our children and may affect how they are educated right the way up to age 16 plus.

If there's a school in the country which is making decisions after the Christmas of Year 7 based on KS2 SATs results, could they please stand up? And if there's a school which sets on KS2 SATs on entry but doesn't redo the entire process at Christmas, again, could they also please stand up? Ofsted will be wanting a word with you.

KS3 SATs are now dead, and the 2010 KS2 SATs were widely boycotted, so the idea that they have any effect beyond (possibly) initial setting in some comps that do coarse setting on admission prior to using NFER tests seems implausible, to say the least.

My 'point' as you put it is that surely the tests are meant to be standardised so that a child is no less likely to meet or exceed a target in Reading than in Maths or Writing.

If by standardised you mean set to a fixed pass rate, then the answer is "they aren't". They're normed qualitatively to a set of achievements, not to marks on a linear scale. See, for example, the English assessment criteria. No-one worries about the pass rate for the driving test, and if it were to rise, no-one would suggest that we need to readjust the expected standard in order to maintain a constant pass rate. If people are meeting the goals, they're entitled to the grade. That's why using them as a setting guide is misusing them: they are not tests of potential (which is why NFER tests are much more useful), nor are they intended to draw fine distinctions. Rather they are tests of which skills have been acquired. Can you use a variety of sentence structures? When I bang the dashboard, can you do an emergency stop?

SATs are there to assess schools and education policy, not individual pupils. There's any number of reasons to be interested in maths results being lower than reading results: perhaps schools are overall not as good at teaching maths as they are reading? Perhaps there's been better work done on driving best practice on reading into primary than there has on numeracy? Perhaps more children struggle with maths than with reading because more parents struggle with maths than with reading? Those are all interesting research questions, and the SATs dataset might provide some insights. Just re-norming them to yield the same grade as centiles would conceal all that. As no-one should be using them to make decisions about individuals later on, there's no need to.

[push-pull-mum]

The sats results are also very important because they are used to set the children in year 7

In fact, in many authorities they're barely used for that, which is why the boycott has had almost no effect. Grammars don't use them, because they've got their admission test results to use. Comps might use them for a few weeks, but after that use NFER tests, which have a demonstrable correlation with GCSEs and provide much richer data.

If there's a school in the country which is making decisions after the Christmas of Year 7 based on KS2 SATs results, could they please stand up? And if there's a school which sets on KS2 SATs on entry but doesn't redo the entire process at Christmas, again, could they also please stand up? Ofsted will be wanting a word with you.

KS3 SATs are now dead, and the 2010 KS2 SATs were widely boycotted, so the idea that they have any effect beyond (possibly) initial setting in some comps that do coarse setting on admission prior to using NFER tests seems implausible, to say the least.

Well since my daughter is going to one of those 'some comps' you speak of so dismissively I think I am entitled to be concerned! The school will not be using NFER tests initially owing to concerns about expense. At what stage the children's groups and targets will be rearranged (if at all) has not be said but since most children perform at the level they are taught to and expected to perform at I would suspect that very little re-arrangement will ever take place. Last term I was handed a piece of paper on which was written my daughter's target for the end of year 6 - based entirely on how she had performed in an optional SAT in year 2 and told that both of these would be used to determine her targets for the end of Key Stage 3. These things happen, tokyonambu, whether they 'should' happen or not and if parents are put off making inquiries by insulting accusations of pushiness, boasting or whatever then they will continue to happen.

No-one worries about the pass rate for the driving test, and if it were to rise, no-one would suggest that we need to readjust the expected standard in order to maintain a constant pass rate.

If more and more people were passing the test and yet more and more people were being involved in road accidents and incidents of dangerous driving within 3 years of taking their test then presumably the pass rate would be questioned.
Statistically speaking more than 50% of 11 years have the 'reading age' (for want of a better word) required for age 14 (level 5 or over) and yet 14-16 year olds are still struggling to access GCSE material owing to poor literacy skills. Surely that means something is wrong somewhere?

And in any case - all that is being said on this thread is that parents would like to know what the levels mean - it's data about our children, funded by our taxation so it it really too much to ask?

[mystery]

Yes, I don't know what the setting policies are in general at comprehensives but I did some teaching practice at an outstanding one recently where the maths and english gcse setting were linked - i.e. you had to do well in maths to move up in English. Also, if there was no space to move up, it could not happen. Certainly the maths courses they were doing involved the use of a commercial maths course with textbooks and exercise books etc that were graded according to what level of GCSE was expected at the end of KS4, or what NC grade was expected at the end of KS3.

If the sets had been based on sheer ability at maths that would have been fine, but they weren't.

So this has taken the original intention of NC levels from being a measurement of the school, to one of differentation of the work for the individual child based on 1 full NC level being predicted progress over a two year period.

Toykynambu, in your experience how do secondary schools set for maths if it isn't on the basis of what the child can actually do (which to a certain extent is always a measure of the teaching they have received) but on sheer ability at maths? It would be very hard for a school to administer mass testing that did this in a cost effective way.

[tokyonambu]

Last term I was handed a piece of paper on which was written my daughter's target for the end of year 6 - based entirely on how she had performed in an optional SAT in year 2 and told that both of these would be used to determine her targets for the end of Key Stage 3 (...) I would suspect that very little re-arrangement will ever take place.

Then you have other problems to confront than your daughter's SATs results, and should be talking to both the schools to understand what they are doing. Setting targets for KS2 on the basis of KS1 SATs alone is simply poor practice: did your child's teacher either do no assessment or pay no attention to it for the past three years? And if a secondary is doing target setting for KS3 based on KS1 (do they even get told these? why?) and KS2 SATs then you need to be in there, talking to them, understanding just what is going on. Your daughter will presumably take a test of some sort at the end of Y7, for example. Are the school saying that Y8 targets and sets will be based on KS2 SATs, and not on progress through Y7? Surely not.

These things happen, tokyonambu, whether they 'should' happen or not and if parents are put off making inquiries by insulting accusations of pushiness, boasting or whatever then they will continue to happen.

That's a fair comment. But if schools are engaging in poor practice over assessment then whether you arrive in the school with a 4, a 5 or a 6 will hardly help. This implies, for example, that they ignore every internal test taken during Y7 and Y8, and that they do not adjust KS3 targets at any point past admission: both are incredibly poor practice. How do they identify children that are struggling?

But unless you've been told by the school's management that they do KS3 target-setting on the basis of KS2 SATs alone (how, when about 25% of schools are boycotting it?) I can't help thinking that it's been distorted in transmission. Primary schools claim all sorts of things about KS2 SATs, because it's in their interests to get parents to take them seriously. But a secondary school that calculates KS3 targets and allocates sets purely on the basis of KS2 SATs, and leaves them essentially unchanged for three years, would be incompetent to the point of inadequacy. That would be reflected in its outcomes, and the basic policy would be so inadequate that I would expect the school to keep quiet about it.

If there's a school that's actually doing KS3 target setting, through Y7 to Y9, based on KS2 SATs, then I'm sorry to hear that. But I suspect you'll find that's not what they're doing, or at least not all they're doing, because the school would be in special measures. Ofsted get pretty lippy about standard setting and assessment, and I think it's a "limiting" item where a fail on that fails the whole inspection. If a school said "we put children into sets on entry based on KS2 SATs and then perform no fresh target setting nor re-consideration of sets until KS3" I think, and hope, an inspector would go ballistic.

Statistically speaking more than 50% of 11 years have the 'reading age' (for want of a better word) required for age 14 (level 5 or over) and yet 14-16 year olds are still struggling to access GCSE material owing to poor literacy skills. Surely that means something is wrong somewhere?

Perhaps. But as the future target for five good GCSEs is 50% of the cohort (a target that's not yet been even rolled out, never mind reached, and has been greeted with howls of protest; it's currently 35%, and was 30% a couple of years ago), why would you be surprised by that?

The SATs "expected" levels are floors: all fourteen year olds should reach this standard unless there's a major and demonstrable cause, so of course a large number of people will reach it earlier. That includes people who will not go on to get five GCSEs at grade A-C including Maths and English by age 16, or anything remotely approximating it. That latter standard is most certainly not a floor, and no-one is suggesting that it should be: even the 30% target is missed in many schools, and 50% by 2015 is highly unlikely. It's entirely consistent for someone to have the floor standard of literacy at 14 and yet find GCSE material extremely challenging, because the floor standard should be reached by ~90% while GCSE is aimed at a smaller sub-cohort. Whether that's the right thing, and what you do to improve matters, is another question, but the grade boundaries on SAT aren't the issue.

Pretty well everyone who achieves a 4 at KS2 will go on to be able to access GCSE, given vaguely competent teaching and target setting, because they will reach level 5 by 14.

There are people who do not reach level 5 by 14; they are a small proportion of the cohort, but what the system should do about them is a challenging and complex issue. Worrying about whether some of the people that got 5s could in fact have got 6s, or perhaps should have got 4s, is hardly the point: those aren't the people failing to access GCSE. The people who can't access GCSE are the people who get 2s and 3s at KS2 and then fail to make progress through KS3 because of it, which in turn means they arrive at GCSE without suitable literacy skills, because not enough secondary schools are set up to deal with students with literacy problems. The number of people who can't access GCSE (assessed as, perhaps those that do not get a significant number of even low graded GCSEs) is roughly comparable to those that get 2 at KS2.

[mystery]

Interesting discussion. OK schools should be doing so much more than looking at NC levels and adding on 1.5 sublevels per annum to calculate future targets.

But in reality what do they do / should they do? Base it on CATs as well? Maybe a little better as it tries to assess ability rather than just what a child has you successfully learned and demonstrated they have learned ..... but then some children seem to exceed in NC levels what the CATs would suggest they could achieve?

So expect more than 1.5 sublevels per annum for the above average child and fewer than 1.5 sublevels from the below average child? But how do you work out which children are above, below and average in ability terms? And if a child exceeds a year end target should one carry on predicting the higher level of progress or say that children learn in fits and starts so still make sure that the cumulative progress over several years is a bit above 1.5, 1.5, or a bit below 1.5 depending on the child's ability, so a year of great progress might be followed by a year of not much progress? Who knows.

Parents strive to get certainty for their own child ....... so if an "above average" child you gets to level 5 or 6 by the end of year 6 they will be feeling pretty confident that good GCSEs and A levels should follow, and that they can argue for a decent set for the child at secondary school (if they produce rubbish scores on school tests early in year 7) etc etc, and that the secondary school's expectations of their child should be high. So this is why parents do get fussed about level 5s and 6s and don't just see it as a measure of the school, but something very useful for their child to achieve. The rest is a mystery to us all.