Pupil Attainment

Attainment and Progress

The Government and Ofsted use two measures of pupils' achievement to judge how good a school is:

• the standards pupils attain compared to age related expectation by the end of Year 6 in mathematics, reading and writing
• the progress pupils make towards meeting these expected standards.

 

The attainment and progress for each school is compared with the national average for all state schools.

Raising the attainment of pupils at St Matthew's and the progress they make is our number one priority.

 

Assessing Without Levels

The DfE announced last year that there would no longer be National Curriculum levels, and that schools would have to set up their own way of assessing pupils. There are now many different commercially available packages, and we have bought into one such package ‘O Track’. Almost all of the systems use the same format, which is similar to the system used in the Early Years Foundation Stage. This takes the end of year expectations for each year group and splits this into 3 main categories as follows:

Emerging   Yet to be secure in the end of year expectations.
Expected    Secure in almost all of the end of year expectations.
Exceeding  Secure in all of the end of year expectations and is able to use and apply their knowledge and skills confidently and independently across all areas.

Under the old levels system, children who were exceeding might have moved into the next level. The DfE now want children who are in the exceeding bracket to add more depth and breadth to their knowledge, and to have more opportunities to develop their using and applying skills. They are calling this phase of learning Mastery and Depth. Children who are unlikely to be emerging at the end of the year may work towards the expectations from the year below. So how will this look at the end of each Key Stage?

Key Stage 1

It is anticipated that the majority of children will reach the assessment point of Year 2 within the expected band of attainment, a smaller number of children will reach Year 2 exceeding band of attainment, and a small number will be at the Year 2 emerging band of attainment, or possibly Year 1 exceeding/expected/emerging.

Key Stage 2

You may have heard of the expression ‘Secondary Ready’ as the standard children must achieve by the end of Year 6. The DfE have slightly distanced themselves from this phrase and are talking about children reaching the assessment point of Year 6 within the expected band of attainment. Similar to Year 2 there will be some children who may be Year 6 exceeding and some children who will be Year 6 emerging. There may also be a small number of children who are still working at a lower level e.g.. Year 4/5 exceeding/expected/emerging.