What to Ask at Parents Evening in Autumn 2026

A target or working-at grade is the number a school assigns to show how a GCSE or Year 12 student is expected to perform, and it is usually the first thing raised at autumn parents’ evening. It is not a statutory disclosure. The Education (Pupil Information) (England) Regulations 2005 list seven items a maintained school’s annual report must contain, and a target grade is not one of them. Academies answer to a separate 2014 instrument with the same gap.

What Your Child’s School Is Actually Required to Tell You — and When

Two different instruments govern what a school must report, and which one applies depends on whether the school is maintained by a local authority or run as an academy — which most English secondaries now are. Regulation 6(1) of the Education (Pupil Information) (England) Regulations 2005 (SI 2005/1437) states plainly that it “applies to the head teacher of any school maintained by a local education authority.” An academy is not maintained by a local authority, so this particular Regulation does not bind it.

For a maintained school, Regulation 6(2) sets the duty and the deadline together: “prior to the end of the summer term of every school year, the head teacher shall” prepare a report for every registered pupil, provide it free of charge, and “make arrangements to enable the recipient of the report to discuss its content with the pupil’s teacher.” What that report must contain is fixed by Schedule 1, and it runs to exactly seven items: brief particulars of achievement in every subject and activity, comments on general progress, arrangements for discussing the report, the attendance record, the results of any public examinations taken, details of vocational qualifications gained, and the results of any National Curriculum tests taken, by score. Read the clause in full and a target grade or working-at grade is in none of the seven.

An academy works from a different route entirely. Its funding agreement binds the trust to comply with the Independent School Standards, set out in the Education (Independent School Standards) (England) Regulations 2014. GOV.UK’s own guidance confirms the mechanism plainly using the standard’s complaints-procedure clause as its example: “All academies and trusts – must have a complaints procedure that meets the requirements in the standard at the Education (Independent School Standards (England) Regulations 2014 Schedule 1, Part 7.” The same Schedule’s Part 3 covers reporting, and its wording is thinner than the maintained-school list: “an annual written report of each registered pupil’s progress and attainment in the main subject areas taught is provided to the parents of that registered pupil, except that no report need be provided where the parent has agreed otherwise.” No seven-item breakdown, no separate attendance or exam-results line – and, again, no mention of a target or working-at grade.

Notice what both routes actually govern: the ANNUAL WRITTEN REPORT, due once a year, at or near the end of the school year – not the autumn meeting where a teacher sits across a desk from you in October or November. Neither Regulation 6 nor the Independent School Standards says anything about what a teacher must tell you at parents’ evening itself. That is precisely why the number you hear in the autumn is worth interrogating: whichever instrument covers your child’s school, what gets said across that desk is the school’s own choice, not a government-mandated form. Ask which route applies to your child’s school if you are not sure – the office will know whether it is maintained or an academy.

So Where Does the “Target Grade” on the Report Actually Come From?

Because it appears in neither statutory list, a target or working-at grade is something a school chooses to build for itself, and how that choice plays out is visible in two schools’ own current published documents. Kingsdown School’s Assessment Policy, reviewed by governors in November 2025, sets out its Key Stage 4 practice precisely: “A minimum target grade/percentage for the individual in each of their subjects, which at KS4 will be their FFT20 target.” The same policy explains what feeds that figure at Key Stage 3: “We use the platform Pupil Progress to record formative and summative assessments at KS3. Pupil Progress uses KS2 Prior Attainment Data to determine students’ minimum target grades.”

Sir Thomas Rich’s School names the same underlying idea differently again, with its own colour-coded tracking rather than a single named benchmark: “In Years 10-13, green highlighting indicates that a pupil is currently on track to exceed their target grade.” Two schools, two differently built conventions – one naming a specific external benchmark, one running its own internal highlighting rule – is itself the evidence that practice varies rather than following one national standard. Some schools name a commercial benchmark directly, some build their own scale, and some run no formal target-setting system at all: nothing in either statutory instrument requires one, so never assume a school you have not asked directly is using any particular method.

The same Kingsdown policy also shows how far a school’s own cadence can exceed the statutory floor. Both routes in the previous section ask for one annual written report; Kingsdown commits to considerably more: “We will report attainment and progress data home to parents 3 times a year for all students. In addition to a ‘progress report’ being sent home three times a year, there will also be an opportunity for parents to attend a parents’ evening at least once a year for all students.” A school offering three progress reports and a parents’ evening on top of the statutory minimum is choosing to, not because Regulation 6 or the Independent School Standards require it.

FFT Aspire is one widely used named example behind exactly this kind of benchmark, which is why the rest of this page uses it to show what a published, checkable methodology looks like – not because every school uses it, but because a parent whose school does, like Kingsdown’s, can ask a far more specific question once they know how the number, and which version of it, was built.

How Does FFT Aspire Actually Calculate a Target Grade?

FFT (the Fischer Family Trust) has been producing these estimates for “20 years,” by its own account, and in November 2022 its FFT Education Datalab team announced a dedicated Target Setting module built into the next generation of its Aspire platform, folding the long-running “estimates” data directly into schools’ target-setting workflow.

The mechanism is worth reading in the provider’s own words, because the single figure a parent sees hides more than it shows. FFT explains: “an FFT estimate is a grade assigned to each pupil”, but “the single grade “FFT estimate” actually summarises a distribution of grades. A particular pupil is estimated to have an x% chance of achieving a grade 9, a y% chance of achieving a grade 8, and so on. The single grade estimate is the mid-point of that distribution.” That is the single most useful fact to carry into the conversation: the number on the page is not a forecast of one outcome and not a promise of any kind, it is the middle of a spread of statistical likelihood built from pupils who are not your child.

That midpoint description matches what FFT calls its FFT50 benchmark specifically – it is one of three challenge levels a school can choose between, all built from the same underlying model. FFT’s own support guidance sets the three out directly: “Average – schools that made the average progress last year (FFT50 – 50th percentile progress)”; “High – schools that made greater than average progress (FFT20 – 20th percentile progress)”; and “Very High” for the top band, FFT5. A school publishing an FFT20 target – as Kingsdown School’s own policy sets for its Key Stage 4 minimum – is not showing a child the midpoint at all: it is showing the grade only pupils with unusually strong progress achieved, a deliberately stretching line rather than an average one.

“Similar pupils” has a precise, published meaning too. FFT defines it as “pupils with the same prior attainment, gender and month of birth” – three named factors, no more. FFT’s own worked example shows how the group figure gets used afterwards: “if a group of 15 pupils have FFT estimates of 5 grade 6s and 10 grade 7s, 15 grade 7s would be seen as positive performance. 15 grade 6s, less so.” A school judges its own performance against that estimate; it is not describing what any individual child will definitely achieve.

The prior-attainment input has changed over time, and knowing the history matters for a Year 11 target specifically. FFT states: “historically, we produced Key Stage 4 estimates using only Key Stage 2 results as the measure of prior attainment,” drawing on the KS2 reading, GPS and maths tests plus teacher-assessed writing. “But because Key Stage 2 tests were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 we include two further flavours of Key Stage 4 estimate based on CAT4 and Key Stage 1,” built for the cohorts that sat no KS2 tests at all. As of that November 2022 methodology, FFT stated: “the estimates currently in Aspire use 2019’s GCSE results” as the outcome data behind the model – a figure worth asking a school about directly, since a national base cohort several years old behaves differently from a school’s own more recent results.

What Changes for a Year 12 Target Compared to a GCSE One?

FFT’s own Key Stage 5 target-setting guide describes a genuinely different mechanism for A-level, not a scaled-down version of the GCSE model. It states: “the estimate itself is based on how similar pupils, (based on prior attainment), have performed in your school in the particular subject over the last three years.” The comparison group is no longer a national cohort matched on prior attainment, gender and month of birth – it is that specific school’s own results, in that specific subject, across the previous three years.

That distinction is worth asking about directly, because a school-specific three-year window behaves very differently depending on cohort size. A large sixth form running Maths every year has three years of a substantial cohort behind an estimate; a smaller school offering a subject to a handful of students each year, or one that has recently changed staff or specification, has a much thinner comparison group behind the same-looking number. Ask how many students actually sat that subject at that school over the three years the estimate draws on – the answer tells you how much weight the figure can really bear.

Which Questions at the Desk Actually Test How the Number Was Derived?

Each question below ties directly back to a fact established above, so an answer – or the absence of one – tells you something real about the number in front of you.

What a Target Grade Is Not — and Why That Matters for This Conversation

Schedule 1’s one genuinely factual item is paragraph (e): “the results of any public examinations taken, by subject and grade.” That is retrospective – an exam has already happened, a board has already marked it, and the grade is a fact. A target or working-at grade is the opposite in every respect: prospective, generated from a statistical model or a school’s own judgement, and never checked against an exam board because no exam has been sat yet. Treating the two as the same kind of number is the single most common misreading of a parents’ evening conversation.

It is not a prediction in the sense a parent usually means the word, and it is not a promise. Our guide to how predicted grades are set covers a related but distinct object – the UCAS predicted grade a school submits for a Year 13 university application, governed by its own separate process. A GCSE or Year 12 target grade is not that number: it has no UCAS role, no university ever sees it, and no national accuracy study tracks it the way UCAS predictions are tracked.

The same target grade sits alongside two other school-generated numbers that are easy to confuse it with. A mock exam grade is graded against a boundary the school itself sets, which is why an A in a mock can become a B or C in the summer without the pupil’s work changing at all. And because many schools refresh a working-at grade around the mock cycle, it helps to know when GCSE mocks actually happen at your child’s school before assuming the figure at parents’ evening reflects the most recent evidence available.