Flight paths in secondary are nonsense and demotivating for pupils SAY OFSTED

I find it astonishing that you have said people are being patronising. You have literally MNsplained your way through this thread.

make it appear effortless is not making no effort. Low effort is quite the opposite of that. We are talking about students who yawn, put their head on the desk, do no homework, write nothing in lessons. That is low effort.

There is plentiful research which links effort to improved achievement. Again, there will be outliers.

My own DSs form pretty good examples.

Judgements do vary from teacher to teacher, from subject to subject and from school to school, Crisp. I’m not sure why you think they don’t. There are no standards to judge these ‘currently working at GCSE grades’ against. GCSEs aren’t awarded a grade by meeting a certain standard. They’re awarded a grade by being in a certain percentage of the cohort. And topic tests and the like aren’t marked against the national picture.

I fully appreciated appreciate this, noble. But relatively there is comparatively more standardisation when similar methodology is used than when it isn't and individual professional judgement is all that is relied upon. Even a flawed attempt at standardisation means much less opaqueness than relying upon so called professional judgement.

Because people who are seriously good at stuff make it appear effortless. Yet it is only so because of their love and enjoyment for it, they don't measure the time spent thinking, planning and doing said subject. Often people who struggle have to make a huge amount of effort just to get started or spend 5 minutes concentrating on something which they find incredibly taxing.

Because the data always suggest what the average student will do within a range of achievement. Clearly you understand that. But there are always outliers. And these systems do not identify who they are : to the teachers, the parents, or the children.

And, yes, thank you. Generally, I can assess effort. As can the students if one asks them.

If your child was working really realy hard and their results in classwork and homework was excleent and/or improving : and then you received a gradesheet thats aid they would eitehr make NO progress or GO BACKWARDS, are you really saying you would be OK with that?

Baffling.

Likewise, the absolute shirkers who the data says will go on to achieve highly or as expected when attendance and effort suggest they really won't : just as bizarre.

Yep, pig, exactly that.

Are you seriously suggesting that teachers can't measure and assess effort?

ought to factor in effort.

And you complain that trajectories aren't accurate. How on earth do you know how much personal effort a student has applied?

There is a lot of judgement in play there.

And a lot of judgement with the traditional A = excellent etc

Flightpaths and any other prediction methods really ought to factor in effort. Generally, they don't.

Our latest lot of data , produced for students nearing the end of year 10, 'predicted' that a whole clutch of stduents (many with top effort grades) would go backwards.

allowing classroom teachers to use professional judgment

What profession applies no standards? If you only judge based on your own teaching experiences, a student's grade will be dependent on what those experiences are. They will vary hugely from school to school, area to area, and on the age and experience of the teachers employed.

It's not grading before a course is complete. It's grading before it's started.

So? The material learnt pre GCSE courses reaches towards those GCSE courses, providing the foundation. Just as preschool and reception provide Early Years Foundation which reaches towards the National Curriculum. And have grading (of sorts). Which flags up any 'concerns' before any formal testing has occurred.

Don't get me started on how nonsensical this all is for English with two different subjects, with each 'data drop' testing a completely different skill, yet some data guy 'predicting' progress from all this and not allowing classroom teachers to use professional judgment as we are not 'accurate' enough!! And ,yet, in my other (more autonomous) subject, I seem to manage.

That said , we have never used these flightpath things. DSs' school did and dropped it after a year because they were widely misunderstood and hated by everyone.

It’s really not

Yes, I know Hip, you concoct it in relation to what your SLT wants to hear at the time.

If a system is based on an invalid assumption, how valid is it?

All systems are based on invalid assumptions. You could always do a Bayesian probability analysis of all the priors...

It's not grading before a course is complete. It's grading before it's started.

Hip, Madonna, I understand the limitations. However these limitations are part and parcel of grading before a course is complete and the final exam taken. My own teacher's grading had the same limitations.

MsRabbit

All young people need to know is where they are at the moment and the next steps planned to help them move forward. Not to be restricted by a nonsense flight path.

I find this incredibly patronising. A flight path need not restrict it just informs as to what an approximated linear progression is. With that information a student or parent can decide whether to alter the way studying is undertaken. Personally I would prefer a teacher not telling me my 'next steps' unless I ask them specifically. They don't necessarily know how much effort I have put in or which learning methodology suits me best.

Of course some schools do actually do full GCSE papers from year 7, for this purpose. I don't think that is better though.

The grade given is an approximation what they would be graded if they took the GCSE paper at the time of grading.

It’s really not.

And that is without addressing the assumption of linear progress. If a system is based on an invalid assumption, how valid is it?

I don't think an approximation of what they would have got if they had taken an exam that they haven't taken, made using a different exam that they have taken, will give the standardisation you are looking for. There is a lot of judgement in play there.

What are flight paths?

The grade given is an approximation what they would be graded if they took the GCSE paper at the time of grading. A trajectory predicts what they will get, assuming linear progress, after studying the subject for the requisite number of years, at GCSE.

Is it using the same system if it is not sampling from the same domain? Or is it just using the same numbers?

I absolutely agree with you noblegiraffe. A different ‘flightpath’ for each young person is divisive and limiting. Parents don’t need to know tagrget grades (different from predicted grades) and neither do pupils. All they do is cause unnecessary stress and anxiety (I am convinced this has been a big reason in the recent rise of young person mental ill-health issues.)

All young people need to know is where they are at the moment and the next steps planned to help them move forward. Not to be restricted by a nonsense flight path.

The trouble is, cool, there is no such thing as “current grade”. The only meaningful grades are for external exams such as GCSEs which are taken by thousands of children and externally marked and moderated.

If I set a test for my class half-way through year 8, and a child scores 68%, what “grade” is that, and how can it possibly relate to a set of GCSE exams they will take in 3 years’ time?

I am required to make up some sort of number, but it is emphatically not a “current grade”.