I thought I’d get in before the deluge of tweets and blogs about grade boundaries, grade inflation, higher versus foundation (and so on) starts this week (no doubt there will be “some sort” of media frenzy!) and I thought I’d have my say early. I am going to try to avoid the hype if I can… it just makes me go “grrrrrr” and I am waaaaayyyyy too chilled out to start on that route.
Before I start, whether you do or don’t agree with the measures used, schools are measured by performance tables. It’s just the way it is. Whether I think that education should be about getting exam results (I do, in part, in fact if you’re interested!) is a different and an almost pointless discussion because “we have what we have” and changing or influencing any changes is bigger than you or me (unless you’re one of the twitterati or work at the DFE). I’m not saying you give up trying to influence or change the system (never give up!) but it’s not for the here and now in terms of this blog post. It just needs to be remembered that parents send their kids, and students come to school with the expectation that, at the end of 11 years of schooling they will sit exams. Whether the measure of success should be set at a grade C again is another discussion I could have with you (see what I mean about not wanting to start down this road??)
So let’s deal with some of the topics that I will be avoiding discussions about:
(1) Grade boundaries Bemoaning the fact that the C grade boundary was “X” and how unfair it was and then producing stats showing grade boundary trends just doesn’t make sense. End of. Of course they are going to fluctuate … the papers differ in terms of difficulty and so you aren’t comparing “like for like”. Again, maybe I’ve missed something here but if it’s an easy paper why wouldn’t the grade boundary be moved? I’ve been having a real “maybe it’s me” moment recently over this, so it could be me that has it wrong.
(2) Exam boards. Saying things like “I should have entered them into X board” is pointless and the only person getting stressed by it is yourself and possibly your head teacher. You used your professional judgement and made the decision at the time based on what you felt was right for your students. Don’t allow yourself to get swayed by the negative press surrounding any of the boards … if you search long and hard enough you can find tales about any one of the choices we have – much of it is driven by social media and p!ss poor reporting by the media jumping on the bandwagon so some of it is inevitable. Laugh at it, accept it’s a consequence of the prevalence of social media and move on.
(3) I knew it! Just knew it! I should have put those students on Foundation/Higher (delete as appropriate!) I genuinely think that if you had made a different choice there would be a different group of students in your group for which you would be saying exactly the opposite of what you are saying right now. I have views about the higher v foundation tier and have blogged about how I think putting students on foundation is limiting their ambition. Hopefully our policy of using higher tier for the vast majority of our students this year is justified.
(4) Using Higher/Foundation is playing the “game” … no! I am paid to get the best progress out of my students. It is not a game. If getting the best grade for them is what I am meant to do, that is what I will do. The new progress measures will move the focus from a “pass” grade (or will they!?!) but for us it has always been about getting the best results for our students and so don’t see these new measurements as scary.
The one topic I will be discussing (hopefully) is our results! I am so nervous … myself and his nibs (Seager) moved together to a new school with a figure in mind (which is slightly higher than our gaffers number to be honest!). I have been warned that our target is probably very optimistic given it was our first year running the department and that most people will expect to be given a couple of years to settle in. We’ll see on Thursday won’t we? I’m quietly confident that our predicted figures at the year-end will be pretty “bang on” what we expect give or take a couple of students either way, so there shouldn’t be any massive surprises.
To put this in context we left a school where the results were in the 1st quintile for “all schools” and also “similar schools” (previously National Challenge too, so has a somewhat challenging cohort!) to a school that last year achieved 75% (A* to C). I know that for some schools this would be an amazing achievement (and it is a good result!) but given its cohort this put it in the 2nd quintile nationally and in the 3rd quintile for “similar schools”, which is the measure I personally like as it shows what can be achieved with similar cohorts.
Me, being me I’ve been hunting around the statistics for the “quintiles” from 2014 to give me an idea of what we need to achieve to get in the 1st quintile for both of the measures and I came across the attached excel file: Quintile Data from Ofsted – have a look yourself! This was published by Ofsted in June 2015 – for us to get in the highest quintile for both measures it’s looking like we need our results to start with an “8”…. Hmmmm
