In response to you 'Hand Solo' forgive me if I have misunderstood but you are required to report the level you are maintaing or the cleared level at every change of frequency therefore you do not need to be told to report the level, unles that is you are being asked to advise your REQUESTED level - this invariably always differs from the flight planned level and is another waste of valuable R/t for us to clear you to your FP level only for you to inform us you only require FLxxx today, which then requires us to reclear you to that lower level.
Another good one as you approach your requsted level is 'ABC123 approaching FLxxx for higher' ,'Roger ABC123 we have that as your filed whats the requested?' , 'we'll maintain this for the cruise ABC123' - the point of this conversation was?????
Getting back to your point, you are asked to report your heading because the standing agreement that you are invariably operating on and the terms of a silent handover mean that if you are on a heading, on the whole we may not turn you from this heading until within out sector airspace whereas without the heading a turn of lets say of 20 degrees is acceptable and will not risk a separation loss against aircraft we know nothing about.
If more of you paid us a visit down in Sunny Swanick or TC for that matter - now that the flight deck is all but out of bounds for us ATCO's perhaps we could all make our lives a little easier..
