End of year reminder: Flightpaths are bollocks, schools giving ‘working at’ 9-1 GCSE grades to KS3 kids are bullshitting

Not seeing the collision there. An A for overall work all year and an A on an exam paper were never considered the same thing, so why so with numbers?

But I still don't understand why it is not meaningful.

This school has done a reasonably good job in the past of getting KS3 students through KS4 and GCSEs with reasonably good grades. They managed a reasonably good job at getting last year's GCSE cohort through the English and Maths new 1-9 GCSE.
Yes, because this year is the giuinea pig year for most GCSEs, it might be that the school will turn out to have messed up its teaching of subject X or subject Y, and the grades won't be as good in that subject. in which case, the school is likely to throw everything it can at that subject or subjects to try and fix it for next year, and while it might still be too late for this year's Year 10s, it would seem reasonable to assume that by the time this year's Year 7s get to GCSE, the school will have worked out how to teach these GCSEs reasonably well.

So, by then one would expect it to be achieving pretty roughly the same average grades as it was before, just translated into numbers (leaving aside the 9s, which are clearly the wild card, and may well depend on how many super bright and motivated DCs there are in a given year, along with luck on the day).
And if for the past 20 years there has been a bell curve at Year 7, and it has translated into a similar bell curve at Year 11 (even though, as we all know, some DCs start working and some lose interest and the places on the bell curve change), why is it not reasonable to give a grade that indicates the place on the bell curve where the kid is at the moment based on the particular exam taken at the end of Year 7? Why is that not meaningful? Sure, we have all seen DCs suddenly click with the subject matter. Sure we have all had DCs be sick on a particular day and under perform (as they can do on the GCSE day). While the KS3 curriculum may be different from the GCSE curriculum, the school is teaching it by and large because it believes that it will lay a good foundation for the GCSE curriculum, and if by and large most students have moved from this curriculum to the GCSE curriculum in the past, and achieved as expected, why should an assessment of it not be meaningful, with the obvious caveat that if a kids stops working, or starts working harder, things may well change.

And why assume parents think there is a huge amount of science in it? I always assumed it was just a teacher's impression... and was happy with that! I still liked the numbers and letters...

When I was at school and NC levels didn't exist and GCSE/O levels were A to whatever letter, nobody thought getting an A in a test or school report in your 1st year at secondary school meant you were on track for an A at O level or GCSE. An A just meant you were doing really well that particular year, in your school's opinion, based on what you had been taught that year in school and what they had tested you on. Why does it have to be any different with numbers 1-9? Why can a child not be given a 9 for brilliant work all year in year 7? Why does the grade have to be something to do with a spurious "flight path"? Why assume it is linked in the parent's mind with GCSE grades at all?

Well I do pretty much know how they got the 4+ or the 1- or whatever. They had end of year exams, and the grade is based on that. In a couple of subjects they specifically allocated 90% is a 4+, but those mostly weren't ones in which you do a GCSE. The others told them at the time of giving them the absolute grade, what their number was. So that 73% for Science was a 4, while 60% for English was a 3. DD also know that hers was the second top mark in Science in (her) second set (and I think that she was only one mark behind the top). She doesn't know how the first set did.
I totally agree that it doesn't mean that she is working at a GCSE level 4 in Science (although my Year 10 DS has been amazed by how much GCSE science she has in fact been taught - they seem to have blurred the curriculum so that, a lot of the science she has learnt directly leads to GCSE science - the linearity is something even DS and I can see.) I don't know what the foundation type papers cover, but it wouldn' t surprise me if a lot of what she had to learn was on it.

But is it true that "No one knows how any school will perform in the new GCSEs,"? leaving aside the grade 9 (which the school has been careful not to specify as being on track for). Given that the grade boundaries are supposed to be pegged to the grade boundaries for the previous GCSE, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that a school might well perform pretty much as it had previously, especially if that was their experience with the English and Maths last year (as I believe it was) - ie pretty much as many 8s as they would have expected A* previously in both English and Maths etc. (If not slightly more).

I’m not suggesting it’s a perfect system. It just suddenly struck me as odd that given ks3 is a separate key stage, then the system many schools seem to reach for is something based on GCSE number grades.

There is that issue. But that might be because ‘mulitply and divide fractions’ is too broad. But, if you as a teacher know you are differentiating questions to challenge the higher attaining or support the lower attaining, then don’t you sort of have an answer about where on the scale of hasn’t met expectations, has met expectations, is working beyond expectations that pupil is?

Yes and no. It is a bit tick boxy, but not in a ‘you need this many ticks for a level 5/there aren’t quite enough ticks for a level 6 way.’.

It’s more of a has met/hasn’t met/working beyond assessment. And you only assess against the objectives you have taught so far, not the entire curriculum. Which, I think, deals better with the issues in that link you posted than APP would have done.

Obviously you can’t account for someone in SLT suddenly deciding you need every objective rather than a few key ones or deciding that teacher judgement isn’t good enough and every decision needs to be evidenced 3 times, or that you need numbers.

I do wonder whether creating meaningless data points and entering them onto spreadsheets sums up the workload issue.

it’s the assumption that each student goes up a grade a year, that turns it into bad stats. I’m not sure what method they use to divide the rest of the grades up between pupils, but if you’re splitting numbers up with + and -, then you’re basically just making it up.

I think that’s kind of the system I had in my head, noble. Is there a reason why some of the more objective led assessment and tracking systems being looked at in primary couldn’t be used in ks3?

Great Maisy we're all happy.

OH btw, I also think it can vary by subject. My DDs modern hebrew tutor just got my Year 7 DD to take the 2017 MH listening and comprehension exams. (I have a tutor for her because my DD is in an accelerated class at school, which is half made up of native speakers, and half made up of linguistically able non-native speakers who have been doing the language all the way through primary school, like my DD has, and it seemed to me, as it did with my DS where i did the same thing, that either one needed a tutor to provide support in that environment, or allow them to kick their heels and be bored in the class below). When it comes to languages, and at least some parts of the syllabus, it seems to me it can be possible to genuinely mark an advanced KS3 student at GCSE level.

TeenTimesTwo
I think I could reasonably say based on this year and their dispositions, your child would be:

• potential 7-9 material
• 5/6 middle attainer, but with scope to gain more
• 4/5 borderline student
• someone who would struggle to achieve a 4

I wouldn't be happy to narrow down on a specific grade. I do think we could reasonably judge where a child might fit. That said, it's probably easier doing that in a school that gets lots of higher grades than one where everyonr is clustered in thr 4/5 mark.

Well our school did the flight path thing.

But from the chart it was pretty clear what they were doing. They were assuming that, with application, each student would go up a GCSE grade a year, and worked down (top grade was 8/9). So the top students in Year 10 were given 7s, and the top students in Year 9 were given 6s, and the top students in Year 8 were given 5s and the top students in Year 7 were given 4s (although I gather they gave a couple of rare 5s - not my DD!). The rest of the Year 7 grades were spread between 1 (or even 1 minus) and 4, so the range the teachers had to work with was -1, 1, 1+, 2-, 2, 2+, 3-, 3, 3+, 4-, 4. 4+.

So what I got out of this was that if one's DC got a 4 or 4+, they were at the top of the year - and therefore (given that the school is a comprehensive but historically the top sets do very well) likely, assumed they continued working well, to end up with an 8/9 etc. I certainly didn't take from this that it was impossible for students to jump two or more grades in a year, or fail to make progress, just that given the current position in the cohort, and how the school generally performs, that is the sort of GCSE grade they expected.
Dunno, didn't seem unfair to me, or bad statistics. We also get some grade predictions based on some sorts of CATs tests from an external agency, and those I have found for my DS (now finishing Year 10) and now my DD as worse than useless. (My DS is very good at maths and science - lower sets in English, these predictions all the way through have consistently shown him as getting an 8+ in English (and pigs might fly) and a 7 in science (would be very disappointing given the grades he has got over the years). It also consistently gives him poor grades in Art (where he is doing very well).
I have told my DD to ignore these "external agency" predictions, but it did seem to me that the 1-4+ grades were meaningful, even if it were to turn out ultimately that the "flight path" was not accurate.

This is an interesting read

Our Y8 boys came home with a numbered grades for both effort and 'progress' (1 - 4 in each case, meaning 'above expected', 'expected', 'below expected', 'causing concern'). Nothing for attainment. It's a system that will change next year, because none of the parents understand it, and there's no consensus about how 'progress' should be measured. I'm not sure how it can/should be improved upon, though.

Yes, unless the whole country does the same exam and everyone's mark is public, you are a bit clueless.

But I don't really understand how someone can be said to be a, say, Level 4 with, say, 45% if the grades will fluctuate according to how well people do? This year or next Level 4 might be 60%. Or is it just Level 9 that will be given to the top 1% or something?

Irma You seemed to be arguing in favour of being given raw exam marks.

I was trying (but failing obviously ) to show that raw exam marks tell you nothing unless a teacher interprets them for you.

We all used to understand NC levels. NC level 6 by end y9 -> Passing your GCSE. Now they have gone parents need something tangible. Flightpaths giving Foundation / Intermediate / Higher are fine by me. Vague enough for teachers not to feel they are over-committing, but useful enough for parents.

My DD recently got 40% in a science test. I had no idea what to think (OK? Hopeless?), until the teacher explained it to me.