Confidence lost in GCSE and A level marking.

Some facts and figures have just been published about the amount of appeals and remarks that have been requested this year by schools for GCSE and A Level candidates.

The Telegraphs sums up the basics quite nicely here - Telegraph - appeals

I was staggered to see that 305 400 GCSE papers were asked to be remarked - a 50% increase on last year.

Let's just let those numbers sink in for a moment....

Each Year 11 has about half a million students in.  It seems about 60% of these students had a result appealed on.  That shows a huge lack of confidence in the exam system.  In an average school of 200 students in year 11, 120 of them are having one GCSE grade challenged.

In addition, appeals cost money.  The amount an appeal cost varies from exam board to exam board but a fee of £25 would be on the conservative side.

Across the country, 305 400 appeals costing £25 totals just over £7.5 million....

Around 20% of these appeals resulted in the grade being changed and the cost of the appeal is refunded to whomever paid it but the time and admin cost to the school is not repaid.

At A level there is a similar picture, with 145 000 grades being challenged.  These generally seem a little bit more expensive to appeal so let's assume £30 (which is definitely on the conservative side).   145 000 appeals at £30 a time gives a total cost of £4.3 million.

So, in total, from one exam season, schools have spent well over £10 million on appeals allowing for the refunds on successful appeals.   This money should be spent in so many more fruitful ways and I am surprised this information has caused such small ripples in the media in our times of austerity.

So, what are the solutions?

1.  Schools need to be clear on their appeals process.  The process is expensive and schools have a responsibility to only appeal where there is a good chance of a grade change.

2.  The exam board needs to mark to a far higher standard.  The checks on markers need to be more rigorous and regular.  In addition, schools need to be made aware of this process of checking so that they become less likely to appeal.

3.  With more and more subjects now being examined in the summer, the pressure on exam boards to turn around results in time for results day is only going to increase.  Exam boards need to up their game.

4.  Finally, the key solution would for an exam board to promise to return all exam papers to the school as part of the fee paid to enter students.  This would give teachers the opportunity to see exactly how their students had performed and to use this to inform their future teaching.  I know it would then cost a bit more to enter students but would probably save money in the long run for schools as appeals would become less likely.

It would just take one exam board to promise it in one subject for it to take off.....

There have to be better ways of spending £12 million pounds...

Mr Cameron sends in the "hit squad".....

This week, Mr Cameron made an interesting announcement about education.  The Prime Minister has announced that rescue teams will be sent into failing schools.

Cameron to send hit squads to failing schools

I’m sure we will see more of these headline grabbing press releases in the run up to the next election in May 2015.

But, who would have thought that such a simple speech,  which is no doubt appealing policy to certain sections of society, could be wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, I’m so disappointed that we are still branding schools as “failing” based solely on such a narrow criteria.  Schools that are below the national average for the proportion of students attaining a C or above in both English and maths GCSE are at risk of being labelled as “failing”.   I’m sure we all agree that attainment in English and maths is important but I would also hope that we would agree that education is about so much more than simply attaining a C or above in 2 subjects.

So, I am hopeful that the new measure of Progress 8 (where schools will be measured on the progress of students across 8 subjects with English and maths counting as double) will start to address my concerns.  The government does have some potentially good ideas.  The way to understand Progress 8 is that English and maths will each be worth 20% of the progress 8 measure with the other 6 subjects being worth 10% each.

Back to the “hit squads”……

There are probably a small number of secondary schools in the country where chaos has descended and the only solution is a completely fresh start with a completely new Senior Leadership Team.    A “hit squad” is probably the only way the students in those schools will get any chance of academic achievement.

However, Mr Cameron has mentioned that there are 500 schools who are at risk of the “hit squads”.  I don’t believe there are this many failing schools and am not personally aware of any school that needs a “hit squad” or know any teachers who would say this about their place of work. 

On the other hand, I welcomed regional school commissioners, with a hope that collaboration would become the way in which all schools could improve attainment.   But, it seems Mr Cameron thinks the “regional school commissioners” are the army generals who decide where the hit squads go next.

Sensibly, most regional school commissioners have accumulated a group of successful head teachers to work in their area at supporting the schools that are supposed to be failing.  Sadly, in my area, all of these head teachers come from schools that are in affluent areas.  Not one head teacher from an inner city school or deprived area is represented.

So, is every inner city school failing or could there be other factors at play here?

Well, there are hugely successful inner city schools out there – we will just never recognise them whilst comparing them with schools in affluent areas.

Am I just being “unaspirational” then?  (If I would be allowed to make up my own words!)  Well, no.

If a student has 100% attendance at a school then they are in lessons for just 13% of a calendar year.  

Assuming students sleep for 8 hours a day, which would be 33% of the calendar year, they are still left with 54% of the calendar year.  This 54% is the part that parents and local communities control.

Having worked in an affluent school, which got 3 “outstandings” in a row from Ofsted and worked in 3 inner city / deprived area schools which have never got above a “satisfactory” or “requires improvement” I feel qualified to judge.

Many of the parents in the affluent area know instinctively what the benefits of education are.  Students arrive in year 7 assuming they are going to go to university.  The parents value homework, take a huge interest in the education of the whole child and make the 54% of time they have valuable.

It would be very simple and guileless to say that inner city schools have the exact opposite.  They don’t.  There are plenty of parents in affluent areas who don’t support the school with aspirational expectations for their children.  However, these parents are in the minority.  In some cases, these students coast and get grades at a mediocre level for them but in many cases the peers of these students drag them up and teach them to value education.

However, there are more parents in inner city and deprived areas who either don’t value education or don’t know how to support their children.  We have a heartbreakingly high proportion of students who have never left the city, let alone experienced a beach, or the moors or even a train journey.

I am proud of the school I work in and we work very hard at engaging with the whole community and spend a huge amount of time showing parents how they can / should be helping their children.  This type of school need the best, most creative teachers but this type of announcement from Mr Cameron will just make it less likely that good staff will want to work in schools like this.

For example, I took a phone call this week from a parent who was deeply annoyed at his son’s maths teacher for setting homework.  The homework was not done and, after waiting a day or two for it to be handed in late, the teacher phoned home to ask for support.  The father announced that he had told his son not to do the homework as when the son leaves school then that time is his own to do as he pleases.

This was on top of a phone call last week in which a different year 7 parent told me that his son would not be doing a detention for continuously disrupting a lesson because I hadn’t proved that it had effected the learning of others and if he wanted to misbehave, and the teacher couldn’t control him, then why should the parent be punished? 

(It turns out that this year 7 lad is required to pick up his younger brother from the local primary school on his way home and if we detained him then the parents may have to turn off “4 in a bed” and go and pick their own kid from the local primary school.)

The boy in the first phone call now does his homework after school in his teacher’s classroom and the year 7 lad did his detention…after the Principal told his parents that he either did the detention or found a different school to go to.  The amount of time this took up has obviously lowered the amount of academic progress these students have met but it was the right thing for the school to do but Ofsted won’t care that we face additional challenges.

Now, I am proud to work in a school that meets these challenges head on and they are two extreme examples.  However, in the school which served an affluent area, I would have parents phoning in asking me to recommend private tutors or asking for extra exam papers. 

The league tables register none of this.

I have no doubt that there are students in affluent areas whose parents let them down but they are few and far between.  Equally, there are significant numbers of parents in my current school who are eager to support their child and have positive aspirations for them.  Sadly, there is a large number of parents who either take no interest in their child’s education or simply don’t value it as  “I never had an education and I’ve done alright”.

So, my hope for the “regional commissioners”?  Well, I hope that they understand the context a school finds themselves in and understand that some schools need a longer journey to reach the same destination as some other schools.  It would be wonderful for the mantra to be collaboration, collaboration, collaboration not “judgement, hit squads and failure”.

I believe the mantra of “collaboration, collaboration, collaboration” will mean that education will become better for all…sadly, I feel I am in a minority….

2014 Maths Levels of progress (KS2 to GCSE)

National Levels of Progress – GCSE Maths 2014

So, it is that time of year again.

Each year, around late October early November, the proportion of students making 3+ and 4+ levels of progress nationally are released and schools are able to analyse how their old Year 11 students have done compared with national averages.  Whilst statistics can never tell you the whole story the data can often offer up questions that benefit future cohorts of students if schools take time to answer them seriously.

The official figures haven’t been released yet but they have been freely available on twitter for several days now.

So, what are they?

Well, as always in education there isn’t a simple answer.  This year’s performance tables will report the attainment of student’s first attempt after November 2013 provided it is better, or the same as any attainment taken before November 2013.  You may remember that Mr Gove decided that only a student’s first attempt should count in performance tables but introduced this after many students had already taken their first attempt at GCSE maths at the end of their year 10.  Thus, there was a bit of a fudge this year.

But, here are the levels of progress for student’s first attempt as explained above.

2014 Maths Levels of Progress

Level 5 – 83%  (81% in 2013)

Level 4 – 64%  (75% in 2013)

Level 3 – 26%  (44% in 2013)

Those of you with a good memory will recall that Ofsted, most of the right wing press, heads of Grammar schools etc. decried the use of early entry as it hindered the attainment of students.  

Apparently, students achieved a C in Maths and didn’t improve upon it.  Well, whilst this might well have been a nice philosophical position to take this year’s results have blown that out of the water.

At Level 5, there has been little change.  The vast majority of students make 3 or more levels of progress.  It is nice to see consistency from year to year.

But, at level 4, there is an 11 percentage point drop.  2014 was not a good year to be 16 and a level 4 student on entry.  Aside from all the politics, this is the really sad indictment of the current education policy.  There are thousands of students now in Year 12, who had they been a year older, would have attained a C in maths and now be studying their chosen course.  Due to political interfering, these students, who would have got a C in 2013, attained a D in 2014. 

Additionally, level 3 students have also had a raw deal.  The percentage of these students who made 3 levels of progress dropped by 18 percentage points. 

Can anyone explain to me, let alone the students, how this can possibly be fair?

I’m all for standards and expectations to rise but please do it at the start of the course, not 6 months from the end.

Finally, the “best” level of progress data is also available.  This data ignores how many times the student has taken the exam and just looks for their best grade.  Again, the figures are low.

Best attainment  for levels of progress.

Level 5 – 86%

Level 4 – 68%

Level 3 – 28%

So, what has caused this significant drop in attainment?

Well, there is a one in a million chance that this year group was particularly weak academically.  We all know that this isn’t true.  Individual schools might get weaker and stronger cohorts but the national picture should remain constant.

The government might want to run down the GCSE so that the new GCSE coming in can be welcomed by teachers.  But, the new GCSE is already coming in so they have won that argument.

The only logical answer is that the government refused to listen to those of us who warned of the unintended consequences of the removal of their early entry policy.  By removing entries from most schools (I believe the number of students entered early this year dropped by 90%) the raw scores in the exam became highly skewed, panic followed and grade boundaries were set broadly in line with previous years.

Let me try and explain what happened.

Imagine there are only 10 bog standard comprehensives in the country and for some reason they have only ever entered their top and bottom set for GCSE Maths.

For those of you not paying full attention the “top set” represents Year 11 students and the “bottom set” represents the Year 10 students.

Year after year they do this and the C+% sits at 60%.

One year all the schools decide to only enter their top set e.g. Year 10 aren’t entered.  The government decides to keep the C+% at 60%.  There will be a lot of upset students at the bottom end of the top set.

In a nutshell, this is what has happened.

Not fair is it…..