1. Now what’s that all about?

2.  Throughout the year, instead of a level, a child will simply be ‘on track’, or ‘not on track’ to achieve a given outcome by the end of the year.  This outcome comes from the National Curriculum, and is common to all state schools.  The outcome (end of year) will be one of the following ◦ Working towards expectations for their age ◦ Expected for their age ◦ Above expected for their age  This is called attainment (what they know at the moment)

3.  If a child is looking likely to not meet expectations, the school will help that child make more progress to improve the likelihood of meeting expectations.  Any child who is not on track to meet expectations will also get more help to make more progress and meet them.

4.  It is easy to know where your child ought to be by the end of the year.  For example, if, at the end of Y3, your child has met the expectations for the end of the Y3, then by the end of Y4, they should have met the expectations for the end of Y4.  This is called expected progress.  If your child’s teacher has evidence to show that this will happen, your child is “on track” to achieve their expectation.

5.  Similarly, if your child was performing above expectations at the end of Y3, we expect them to perform above expectations by the end of Y4.  This child would be “on track” if their teacher has evidence to show that this will happen.

6.  How tall is this child? Without knowing where to place the bottom of the tape measure, we cannot know.  Similarly, unless we know what our children know and don’t know at the start of the year, we cannot measure progress.  We need some way of finding this out.

7.  Once we have found out where a child is at the beginning of the year, measuring progress is easy.  We have a number of ways of doing this ◦ Short tests ◦ Talking to the children ◦ Information from previous schools and previous teachers  This is called finding a baseline