I never thought I’d say this, but it’s time to bring back the old Sats system

While I’d be the first to say National Curriculum levels weren’t perfect, they did at least give you an indication of whether your child was making progress

Parents and teachers are opposed to the new gradings for the Sats exams (BSIP)

I’m sure I won’t be the only parent to be flummoxed by their child’s school report this year. National Curriculum levels – which graded primary pupils’ progress on a scale of one to six – have been scrapped and primary schools now have to create their own system of assessing students internally.

My daughter’s school now grades children’s progress as “working below", “emerging towards” “achieving” or “exceeding” year group expectations. Many schools are taking a similar approach and, quite frankly, it’s worrying.

My daughter is a fantastic writer for her age, but struggles with maths. Yet she was graded as “achieving expected” progress in both, which left her feeling pretty demoralised.

More importantly though, I have no idea how she is doing in maths. Has she made any progress since last year? Is she just scraping along? Or is she riding high at the top of the “achieving expected progress” kids?’ Who knows.

It gets worse. I’ve heard from numerous teachers that the bandings for this new assessment system are so broad that a child who is just about keeping their head above water academically can easily end up in the “achieving expected” band with the high fliers.

And when I asked my daughter’s teacher about her disappointing writing grade, he explained that none of the children in her year group were graded as “exceeding expected” levels of progress in writing. The government standards for writing (which are littered with phrases like subordinating conjunctions, subjunctive, passive and modal) are just “too hard” to reach for even the most able Year 5 students, apparently.

According to the government, the rationale behind “assessment without levels” is to allow teachers to focus on developing children’s understanding rather than getting them across the next grade threshold. This is essentially a good thing, but why leave parents out in the cold, with no real idea of how their child is getting on?

While I’d be the first to say Sats levels weren’t perfect, they did at least give you an indication of whether your child was making progress.

Most parents could grasp the idea that their child was supposed to make two sub-levels of progress over the course of a school year (each grade had three sublevels – A, B and C – with A being the highest). In fact, seeing my daughter hadn’t made two sublevels of progress one year, raised alarm bells for me about the quality of maths teaching at her previous school (something that was highlighted in a subsequent Ofsted report).

Children seemed to understand Sats levels too; listening to my daughters’ friends, it was clear they understood that going from a 4C to a 4A was a good thing, and something to aspire to.

I did most of my schooling in the 1980s, when assessment generally meant you received a “unsatisfactory”, “satisfactory” or “good” scrawled in red pen in your exercise book. It was hard to gauge how you were doing or what you needed to do to improve.

The introduction of a more data driven system in the 1990s, where children were assessed using National Curriculum levels and sat exams set by the government felt excessive at first. But I think the public is now firmly on board with the idea that assessment should be as much about helping children make progress, as it is about checking teachers and schools are doing their job properly.

But if these new grading scales are anything to go by, we could be returning to the bad old days of the 1980s. And the incoming education secretary Justine Greening – who replaced Nicky Morgan earlier this week – will have the unenviable task of dealing with the fallout.