11 Plus Exams Forum

Hi All,

I am preparing my selection review paperwork and have a few questions...

When speaking to my DC headteacher as well as class teacher they informed me that schools now level a child differently. Eg. Instead of 5A in reading for example they have targets/objectives that they either 'met' or 'mastered' etc.

How will this work in the selection review documents?
The school have stated it is a national thing but I haven't seen anyone else write about it and I am concerned it will affect my review.

Any advice is welcomed! thanks all!

Levels went a year ago and schools were meant to develop their own system of assessment.

In the Bucks advice to Headteachers there are four 'levels' for KS2 predictions:
A below expectations
B at expectations (which I interpret as old level 4b)
C above expectations (? level 5)
D significantly above (?? high level 5/level 6)

I suspect this is to try to 'standardise' Heads but there is no certainty these descriptions will be applied consisitently!

PrincessPrabz wrote:Hi All,

I am preparing my selection review paperwork and have a few questions...

When speaking to my DC headteacher as well as class teacher they informed me that schools now level a child differently. Eg. Instead of 5A in reading for example they have targets/objectives that they either 'met' or 'mastered' etc.

How will this work in the selection review documents?
The school have stated it is a national thing but I haven't seen anyone else write about it and I am concerned it will affect my review.

Any advice is welcomed! thanks all!

There is actually quite a bit of discussion on the forum, as part of several threads. A common way that schools are looking at assessing children is to say whether they are 'working towards', 'meeting' or 'exceeding' expectations (actually, not sure that's the right word, but something like 'expectations'). Presumably the schools are stating somewhere what those expectations are for each school year. And one hopes that different schools' 'expectations' bear some resemblance to each others' for the sake of consistency, of course.

Unfortunately I don't think it is going to be consistent as my headteacher has confirmed that all YR6 children are now 'below average' because the new expectations for this year are considerably higher.... and you can not unfortunately make any comparison to last years levels. So if for example your child was a 5A in reading at the end of YR5 they are still 'below average'??? To say I am deflated after finally getting back my headteachers review form is an understatement

Sorry that isn't correct - the 'old level 4b' is still what Year 6 expected is.

Perhaps you might be better waiting for an appeal?

Guest55 wrote:Sorry that isn't correct - the 'old level 4b' is still what Year 6 expected is.

Perhaps you might be better waiting for an appeal?

I was thinking i may be better off waiting for appeal but then I still would not have the support of the school anyway. I am having a face to face meeting today and would like to know where you found this information. It is legal/factual evidence or just based on people opions?

PrincessPrabz wrote:Unfortunately I don't think it is going to be consistent as my headteacher has confirmed that all YR6 children are now 'below average' because the new expectations for this year are considerably higher.... and you can not unfortunately make any comparison to last years levels. So if for example your child was a 5A in reading at the end of YR5 they are still 'below average'??? To say I am deflated after finally getting back my headteachers review form is an understatement

I really don't understand why schools are saying these things ........ but I haven't looked at the reading in detail yet.

But I've just been through the sample papers for KS2 2016 maths test with my year 5 child. I can see nothing like upper level 5 work and certainly nothing remotely level 6ish in them. I don't know what this is all about - maybe the samples are misleading but I can't see anything remotely difficult sounding in the year 6 programme of maths in the DfE national curriculum document.

I think that it must be difficult for all schools to hit their floor target of at least 85% of children achieving the equivalent of an old 4b or higher and there are maybe some things expected in the new expected national standard for maths, reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar which were not expected in order to get a 4b before ........... but all this stuff that some schools are saying about higher level children not having achieved year 6 levels until towards the end of year 6 seems to be complete tosh to me.

I don't know what to suggest about your appeal panel quandary. The panel members could be equally badly briefed seeing there seem to be such widespread myths abounding about the new national curriculum and also some schools not teaching very much now for a few years to children who were already old level 4s quite early on.



I see more money being spent on Educational Psychologists for 11 plus appeals than ever before.

Ah - what G55 says is not opinion. Let me dig out the document.

Here it is:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/scaled-scores" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Read this through and you will see where this comes from.

I don't know much about what is happening in other schools but in my DSs school, ALL children start off in the BELOW EXPECTED level and are kept there for a certain number of weeks/months. The school refused to say exactly how long. They will then move to EXPECTED, if appropriate, according to the teacher. She also suggested that the focus is to cover everything in this level and they will NOT rush/push the child into EXCEEDING. When I asked if they would support a child who is already very good at Maths (DS achieved 5a at the end of year 5) and has the potential to move to the next level I.e., expected, she refused to say yes. The focus, I was told, was to make the children very secure in the concepts at EXPECTED level. Also no correlation was given between the new and the old systems.

Crazy. Bad if you are in year 6 and bored silly and bad if you are in year 5 needing to cover 11 plus material. The new nc does not exactly say this.

mystery wrote:Crazy. Bad if you are in year 6 and bored silly and bad if you are in year 5 needing to cover 11 plus material. The new nc does not exactly say this.

Exactly :-S