Just got back from DCs year 11 parents' evening and i felt a slight air of panic amongst the teachers .....

Rowlers I don't have another job. But, seeing as my childcare bills are currently almost as high as my wage, I'm not exactly in it for the money.

I used to say that I did the job because I enjoyed it and wanted to keep my CV intact. As for the former, that simply isn't the case and as for the latter, I simply don't give a shit any more. I have had enough of flogging myself and neglecting my children for a job that I no longer gain any pleasure from.

It's a shite state of affairs (to quote a favourite film). Underfunding, excessive scrutiny and a Secretary of State who has firmly pitched himself against the profession has led to this. I was once a firm tory voter who would rather have cut of a limb than go on strike. For me to get to the position where I would gladly stand on the picket lines must come as a warning as to how bad the situation is. I am not a 'leftie' by any stretch of the imagination.

I would rather serve pints in the local on a Saturday night than spend another year doing this job.

We (English Dept.) are converting raw scores to UMS very cautiously - ie. based initially on last June's 'fiasco' boundaries & assuming a Doomsday scenario, with a further twist of the knife & boundaries rising by another 10%.

We're telling students (& parents) that we don't feel we can confidently predict a grade is safe unless they're 10 UMS marks over the boundary based on the 'fiasco' conversion .

Much gaming of the system is in progress, with students off timetable to re-do Controlled Assessment with as much help as we dare (which is rather less than the HT is trying to bully us into, frankly).

If we're wrong & the boundaries don't get hiked again, the unprecedented level of hothousing & re-doing which is going on means we'll break all records. Better for the school, I suppose, at least in the short term, but not sustainable or better for the kids.

We want the results to be fair & accurate; neither nobbled like last year nor artificially inflated by excessive intervention.

If any of my dc were in KS4 at the moment, I think I'd be tearing my hair out entirely...it is indeed crap. .

(Arya, have you got another job? curious, as I'm hoping for a way out ...)

Absolutely. And while Gove will be really smug that he has, singlehandedly, brought some rigour back into education, Wilshaw and his friends will still be commenting on the 'coasting' teachers who are not achieving the same levels of progress for their students as they were last year.

No one can win. Students, patients, pensioners etc always end up falling victim to career politicians who love to smile in front of the cameras and celebrate the fact that they've made life better for everyone.

This is why I'm leaving the profession. I loved my job for 10 years, and was bloody good at it. Now I don't.

This is so crap.

In a few years time, employers, etc won't remember that the GCSE's started being marked more harshly this year

IME the examining boards change boundaries all the time. In any subject where there is more than just right or wrong answers, it can be pot luck what grade a student comes out with. They will always be able to justify themselves by converting raw marks to UMS grades.

The proportion of A* and A grades has grown rapidly over the last 10 years or so.

I think most Boards and many subjects have issued guidelines of their intention to reverse this trend this year; in fact modules taken by students for 2013 cash-in have already had these stricter grade boundaries applied. I know it is certainly happening in Science.

We have no idea what the grade boundaries will be. Also a Science teacher, and thus taking our first year 11s through the new specification. Massive shift in raw score to UMS conversion in some January papers compared with June papers last year, which makes us a bit nervous.

The English fiasco in 2012 at least made it clear that all notion of criterion referenced grading is out of the window, and norm referenced is back in.

As a (soon to be ex) science teacher, I think this year's grades are going to be significantly lower than last year's.

A report was issued by Ofqual in about 2008-ish stating that GCSE exams in science were far too easy (note that this pre-dates Gove significantly). Hence new GCSE specifications were written with first teaching in 2011.

Basically, the 2006 specification revisions made passing GCSE science with a high grade far easier than before (our department went from 85% A-C to 97% A-C over night). The new specification is much more challenging, and our Core science results indicate that results are likely to be more in line with the pre-2006 ones.

I don't think this applies to other subjects, however.

When we had DS's parents evening the English department were a bit reluctant to make firm predictions after last years fiasco but the other departments seemed quite happy.

We did have presentation about revision techniques last week and I was so stressed by the end of it that I felt I ought to go home and start revising, DS however was unmoved