7yo spelling level question

My SO's daughter goes to school in New Zealand. She is a high performer according to her grades and recently got an 11/12 on a spelling test.

However, upon looking at her actual spelling test, I was surprised. The words were what to me seem like 5yo level words: Love, Bear, Mother, Some, Ball, Tree, Child, Looking, etc. (Her only mistake was "chylb" for Child.) Surely a 7 year old (8 in November) must be more advanced than that, I thought. Must just be a routine basic words test. I didn't dwell on it.

Last week she sweetly wanted to write a card to SO for his birthday. She needed my help to spell 80% of the words on a very simple "hope you have a fun day" letter and constantly inverted her b's, d's, a's and s's. So yesterday I bought her a couple of kids animal facts books. She could not recognise any word longer than four letters. I had to slowly sound out the letters for her before she could understand the word. What!

I'm shocked at this apparent lag in educational standards. I distinctly remember binge reading Enid Blyton books and writing silly kid poems and stories with little difficulty at age 6 and 7. I remember my exact age because this was frequently done during my Number Bonds Math class, and I was hence frequently punished for it. I don't recall being considered amazingly advanced in English for my class, I'm pretty sure everyone around me could read and write reasonably well by age 7. We all wrote Valentines and shit to each other every year in class, easy peasy.

So what's up New Zealand schools?? Is this weird to any other parents out there? If I were assessing this child without knowing her report cards I would be horrified at how backward she is, yet she's earning A's and stars in school!