To think the 2 tier GCSE system is wrong

There's always been two tiers (actually when i did it, i've just been reminded there were 3) - I was put in for the middle paper (they just put us all in for that, regardless of skill) so I got a B for my Maths GCSE - the highest mark possible. I don't doubt I would have got an A in the higher.

Falling off the bottom is because a paper can only be so long - they can't test well at both ends of the level all on one paper. I would think that if you fall off the bottom of the higher, then you can just take the lower later on though - it's not as though they'll leave you high and dry with nothing, retakes have always been a thing.

How weird. Changing it to the numbers seemed like a daft idea too I didn’t know they also did that!

Scottish Standard Grades used to have 3 levels, and a few had 2.

For the 3 level ones it was foundation, general and credit. I was in credit classes and so sat credit as default and general as back up, but it was a harder choice for those in general - give credit a go, knowing you hadn't covered it all, but hope general was a safe result if credit didn't go well, or do foundation just in case something went pear shaped in the general papers on the day?
Credit was 1 or 2 (top grades).
General 3 or 4.
Foundation 5 or 6.
To do Higher they generally expected a 2 or above overall.

It was more complicated in that many subjects had 2 papers at each level, so most folk sat 4! Some people passed one paper at one level and the other paper at a higher or lower level.
Science individual subjects were only 2 levels (credit or general), science mixed subject was also only 2 levels (general or foundation).

To top it off we were at the time when S grades were just being introduced and some subjects were still ordinary (O) grades, making for more confusion!

Hope your daughter gets the support needed to make the correct choices.

Not since the introduction of the 9-1 GCSE in 2017.

Wait there is no lower and higher paper anymore in English?! 😳

I don’t know the details of the Maths paper as I’m an English teacher but I do think it’s an absolute disgrace that they removed the tiers for English. It’s now completely inaccessible to a huge number of children.

Thanks for expanding on your method @NeverDropYourMooncup. Out of curiosity I had a quick noodle around on Bromcom Vision to see what the picture is in my trust.

We are a medium trust across one region. All of our secondaries are non-selective and there is a handful of super-selective grammars in our region who might hoover up the children who were out of the state sector for primary. Our outcomes mirror the national picture quite closely.

Across the MAT in years 7-9 the percentage missing KS2 data is about 8%. We don’t have any specialist places so we have very few children who would have been withdrawn because they were working at pre-KS levels. Obviously the current 10s and 11s have none at all. If I had access to historical data I suspect this might have been higher in those cohorts with large influxes of HK and Ukrainian children but this has settled down as their younger siblings attended primary and took SATs.

Yes, in theory it would help those around the grade boundary. The problems I see are these though:

• If you had the same number of foundation and higher questions as currently, it would make a ridiculously long exam.

• Foundation student would likely spend ages over some long, hard high level questions. These students would run out of time, fail to complete all the easier questions, and end up with no marks for easy questions they didn't do, and no marks for hard questions they got wrong. They'd fail or get a very low pass.

• Higher students would spend ages rushing through low mark, relatively simple foundation questions, and then not actually have time to complete all the complicated higher questions, so they would get a low grade because they had only shown their low capability not their high one.

This is why the intermediate paper needs to make a return.

With the three levels a pupil who didn't do well up to Year 10 would be entered for the Foundation Paper, with no chance of getting a 'Pass' grade. No matter how hard they tried in Year 11, and many 'saw the light' in Year 11, they had missed too much of the content to move up to the Intermediate paper, I know because I ran catch up classes in Year 11 for those wanting to tackle the Intermediate paper and it was rarely successful with all the other demands on their time. That was why the two levels were introduced giving everyone the chance of a Pass grade.

That's because the content of the English paper is accessible at all levels with a differing degree of sophistication determining the grades. In Maths that would not be possible, for the pupil who finds Maths challenging it would be wasting their time to try to teach them the A*/A level work.

I agree. We had 200ish kids in my year at school and we were split into sort of low/medium and high groups for most subjects, across half the year. But for maths we had 8 sets. The difference is huge. And many subjects not covered in the lower groups. The exam would be ridiculous to cover all.

I’m shocked there is only two papers for maths now. I say the higher paper as it started with questions at a C grade so yes if you didn’t get enough of those right you’d fail. But no one sitting it would have done that.

If that was any chance of happening but you were ok at maths you’d do the middle paper, couldn’t get any higher than a B but meant you’d likely get your C and wouldn’t fail.

People who struggled did the lower.

Seems odd they would remove it. It must be people getting whatever is the equivalent of an A or A* now must be filling out a load of easy questions at the start of the paper?!

Kind of skimmed your post, but the government data is 8.3% so 🤷‍♀️

You know that I've already allowed for schools not sending it over by getting it from the PAG and GIAP, right?

My understanding is that basically the higher paper only covers the assessment criteria (BTec background here!) for the higher grades. Therefore you can't be awarded lower grades as these have not formally been assessed and there would be no way to distinguish say a 1 from a 2.

In fact the vast majority don’t.

The only ones that do (as has been said) are
maths
science (so this will be two or three GCSEs, depending if double award or separate sciences are sat)
MFL

The OP hasn’t said which of these her DD is taking, but at most it is five GCSEs out of 8-9-10 being sat; obviously it may well be fewer than that.

Some GCSE subjects currently don't actually have tiers.

there's not usually many/ any questions in the higher paper that are at level 2/3. In the old style GCSE's, the first three questions on the high paper overlapped with the foundation paper, but the rest were at higher levels, I assume it's still the same. So if you only get, say 20 marks, you've not demonstrated the skills needed for levels below the one you're being assessed at.
For example, one of the overlap questions for the board I sat always used to give a recipe for something, and then there were 2 or 3 questions which asked you to work out the quantity of something you'd need to make a different amount of the recipe (eg a recipe was given for 8 cupcakes, and you'd be asked how much flour you needed to make 12 cupcakes, and how much butter you'd need to make 20 cupcakes). In the higher paper, the idea would be that this was an easy question, and you'd then use those skills to answer more complicated questions. In the foundation paper, this may be the most advanced form of the skill you'd be asked to do, but you'd have been asked earlier a question about 'if bill and ben share out 18 beads in a 2:1 ratio, how many beads does ben get'.
Part of this logical is 'it makes no sense for kids who'd be doing foundation to sit a paper with half the questions they can't answer' and 'it makes no sense for kids who're more advanced to have to demonstrate basic skills in basic questions where we can see they'll be using the same skills in multi-step, more advanced questions'

Could you get her to do a few past-papers from the appropriate exam board at home, and grade them for her (the mark schemes will be available online)? Try maybe two at each level, and then you may have a better idea of how she's doing and you can have a discussion with her and her teachers about what will be best. For most classes, they'll be being taught to a syllabus based on which paper they'll be sitting (higher has more advanced content),so they should have some idea of which paper she's being taught to at this point in the year!

You know that’s schools not bothering to send over the data, right?

My source is unfortunately unverifiable as it's confidential data - I'm not making it up, but maybe it'll be reassuring to confirm my processes to show if there isn't KS2 data on record, that's because there isn't any and not because I'm a bit crap and lazy? 😀

Summer term - export results from the Primary Assessment Gateway. Have already obtained UPNs at this point, so easy to do.

Summer term - CAT4s. Export from Testwise and do a quick analysis, map to the correct results sets and import onto the MIS once admitted (necessary for timetabling in Nova and the Parentpay preadmission sync/etc).

Summer - Holiday - September - importing CTFs from feeders. If I'm lucky, they've remembered to tick the box meaning they actually hold the KS2 data. But it's so patchy, I've never relied upon that. Oh, and because secondaries can't access the youngest of the cohort's data until they've reached 11 years old in GIAP, giving the UPN, still checking the PAG for the very late summerborns.

September onwards - catching up on late starters, in year admissions and missed CATs, exporting NPD KS2 data from GIAP once I get the update on Slack that it's been added. Occasional reassuring of SLT that I've got baseline data on every student, I've already created a series in 4Matrix and it's all been there since the end of the first week of term.

I've already created a marksheet template ready for the data with assorted pupil information columns to include previous school and a column to calculate average KS2 Reading and Maths score to then use two separate nested IF THEN ELSE formulae to place them into the appropriate High, Middle and Lower categories for KS2 and CAT4s (conveniently, the Mean SAS is already on the CAT4 data, which saves me about 90 seconds).

If I then click Calculate and Save, I can export unformatted to Excel and it's easy as anything to see who has KS2 data, who doesn't and whether there are any discrepancies between KS2 and CAT4 bands/the schools where this happens.

It's about 1 in 5 without KS2 data (excluding the in year admissions, where it's more of a 60:40 split of not having data to having it, the rate of absence of data increasing the higher up the year groups you go). It's not a selective area and it's not any more or less diverse than any other state school in the area.

Government data says 8.3% of pupils weren't assessed in all three subjects.

It's absolutely not my experience that a typical secondary school is consistently missing KS2 data for 20% of their intake. I'd be genuinely interested to see your source / working for that claim.

Back of a fag packet anecdata says it's running at about 20% of any given primary's pupils - 1-2 out of 5 from each primary will be missing KS2 data.

In my experience, 20% is pretty statistically significant.

Not always - P8 only includes those who have Key Stage 2 Data. This excludes many children who were not in the country at the time, any that were privately educated, unwell or had a parent who decided to withdraw them.

There are only a handful of state secondary schools where these criteria will affect a statistically significant proportion of the cohort, likely grammar schools with a very high intake of children who attended preps and schools with very volatile populations and very high numbers of new arrivals to the country (I worked in one). P8 is imperfect but not for this reason.

Not always - P8 only includes those who have Key Stage 2 Data. This excludes many children who were not in the country at the time, any that were privately educated, unwell or had a parent who decided to withdraw them. It also includes the effect of frequently higher ability and often higher income families where they've taken dance, drama, speech and music exams outside the school, as well as community languages.

The other limitation is inherent in the system, being that it is in the interest of the primary to show the greatest level of progress for those that were assessed at KS1 - the much discussed teaching to the test and far too frequent occurrences of malpractice (as evidenced by disciplinary records).

When I'm importing and analysing/comparing baseline assessments, I can see particular schools where their children have scored securely mid range and expected levels, but the children when assessed independently appear to have regressed into the lowest ability band within the course of six weeks - not even over the summer, but six weeks after the SATs whilst they are still at their primary. It's exactly why so many schools use CAT4s or other baseline assessments - the data from KS2 is inherently compromised by the nature of the system and whatever the DfE might say, you still need to be able to see the underlying facts to be able to get the kids the education they deserve (which often involves picking up SEND that the primary hasn't shown the slightest indication of awareness about).

Attainment 8 covers everybody who sat exams. Being aware that this isn't the be all and end all, as an inherently high ability cohort will look better, but also being mindful that P8 isn't the cover-all-bases measure that successive governments have sought to claim, is how parents can look at data - the numbers that leave in Y11, the rate of permanent exclusions in the Autumn term, the comparison between P8 and A8,