Measured against the real ladder
Every skill in the syllabus is tagged to the ladder the Victorian Department of Education already uses. "Where your child sits" becomes a claim any teacher can verify, in the language every school-entry interview already speaks.
Three domains
Early number sense
Subitising, true counting, numeral–quantity mapping, patterns and order. Quantity before symbols, always.
Phonemic awareness & oral language
Hearing, isolating and blending sounds, before letters and before writing. Plus dense vocabulary and full-sentence reasoning.
Spatial reasoning
Pattern replication, 3D construction from memory, fine-motor control. The quiet predictor of later maths.
The ladder
The Victorian Curriculum achievement standards define the bands. Wedgetail derives your child's operating band per domain from logged, demonstrated mastery only. It then reports the delta against the age-expected band. A Prep-age child working at Level 2 is a +2 delta. That is the number that matters.
| Band | Typical age | Maths exemplars | English exemplars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Towards Foundation A–D | pre-school | Attending → recognising small quantities → early counting | Responding to sounds → rhyme and syllable awareness |
| Foundation (Prep) | 5–6 | Count to 20, subitise small collections, match names–numerals–quantities | Phonemic awareness, letter–sound knowledge, decode CVC words |
| Level 1 | 6–7 | Count and order to 120, partition, skip-count | Read decodable texts, blend and segment fluently |
| Level 2 | 7–8 | Place value to 1000, addition and subtraction strategies | Fluent reading, morphemic spelling |
Dispositional development (identity, wellbeing, curiosity) sits under the VEYLDF, the Victorian framework for birth to eight. Wedgetail tracks it as context, never as a score. Children are never graded on who they are.
What excellence means here
A sustained positive delta with intact engagement. A syllabus that burns out the child or the parent has failed, whatever the band says. So adherence and engagement are first-class metrics in the engine, and every failed check ride gets an easier, different drill instead of pressure.