On the school report, maths gets one line. That line has to cover half a year: nearly two hundred school days, summed up in a phrase such as “working towards expectations”. Why one line, and why twice a year? The answers are in forty years of paperwork, in three countries.
When England introduced its national curriculum in 1988, it came with attainment targets and levels: a single ladder that every child would climb through school. Over time the levels were split into sub-levels — 4c, 4b, 4a — and by the end of primary school the expected level was Level 4. A child’s progress in a subject became a code.
A code is tidy. It is also easy to misread. In 2013 the Department for Education announced that levels would go, and said why, in words NFER quoted at the time: “We believe this system is complicated and difficult to understand, especially for parents.” Levels, it added, “will not be replaced”.
Two years later, the government’s Commission on Assessment without Levels put the deeper problem plainly:
“…a pupil could have serious gaps in their knowledge and understanding, but still be placed within the level. This meant it wasn’t always clear exactly which areas of the curriculum the child was secure in and where the gaps were.”
Final report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels, September 2015, p. 5
That sentence is the whole story of the one-line report. A level, a grade or a band is an average. A child can be secure in number and stuck in geometry, and the average hides both.
With nothing national to replace levels, schools wrote their own scales. NFER’s 2018 research found the result in the handover between schools: because the primary schools “used different assessment approaches and terminology, it was difficult to understand the attainment data they provided”.
One phrase did become official. The Standards and Testing Agency’s interim teacher assessment frameworks for the end of key stage 2, published in September 2015 for the 2015/16 year, wrote “working towards the expected standard” into the national framework. If it is on your child’s report, we wrote about what it does and does not tell you.
Australia made the timetable a legal condition. The Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004 required reports that “use plain language” and are “given at least twice in any program year” (section 15). From 2006, according to ACER’s review of school reports, those reports were also expected to grade each subject from A to E.
New Zealand’s National Standards, introduced in 2010, placed children in four bands — well below, below, at or above the standard — and National Administration Guideline 2A set the timetable: “Reporting to parents in plain language in writing must be at least twice a year.”
In December 2017 the National Standards were scrapped. As 1News reported at the time, “Parents will still get report cards at least twice a year on their child’s progress across maths, reading and writing, but it will not be measured against National Standards.”
Across three countries and nearly forty years, the words changed again and again: levels and sub-levels, A to E, four bands, “working towards”. The number of readings did not. Twice a year is a rule written for fairness and for paperwork, and it does that job. It was never meant to be an instrument.
None of this is the teacher’s fault. One report has to be fair to every child in the class, in language that is kind and defensible for all thirty of them. The closest eyes on any one child are at home.
You do not need a heavier check-up to see more. You need a more frequent one, and one that keeps the parts of a subject apart:
Alpenrise is a mountain your child climbs in the browser: ten questions a night, four strands measured apart, and a Sunday page with the one thing worth doing next. See how it works for parents, or watch the two-minute film of this story there.