It may help to look at the percentage of level 5 passes on that table. It shows this figure has gone up over the past 5 years and went up this year too.

I would suggest that the standards have not dropped but there was a significant number of children who had learning difficulties for that year group this year.

This link seems to support this: http://www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/scho...urn=100677
It suggests that the 67% attainnment was because many low attainers did not get a level 4 probably caused by the high number of children with English as a second lanaguage. HTH