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

LOL : are you even vaguely aware how often the governement moves the goalposts in education??

Of course I am. But the government have other stuff to do at the moment...

. However this current climate will only last a few years whilst the data is being compiled and analysed

LOL : are you even vaguely aware how often the governement moves the goalposts in education??

Am a bit out of date now having been out of secondary for a few years, but my experience of flight paths as an MFL teacher was seeing that some of my pupils were expected to achieve a higher grade for their foreign language (which they had only been doing at that point from Year 7) than they were for English - which they had done all along. This was because, as SATs are only for core subjects, they took an average of English and Maths results and gave that as the target for MFL. This meant that those who were stronger at Maths and weaker at English were supposed to get a higher GCSE grade in French or German than they would in English.

SLT wouldn't accept that this was complete nonsense and a lot of my poor children felt they had failed.

In my experience therefore, flight paths were shit.

Very true. Last year's papers were really difficult in my subject.

marco, I do have some sympathy regarding the problem of grading, assessment and progression mapping, in the context of exams being changed. However this current climate will only last a few years whilst the data is being compiled and analysed. Every year that goes by, the picture becomes clearer. And for that their needs to be data collection, compilation, continued analysis and parents should be put in the picture.

It is a closed shop you are capable of joining if you wish to change things from within.

I don't need to. I am well practiced at successfully dealing with 'closed shops'.

noble, wow! So sensitive! This is only a discussion on Mumsnet. I have learnt from it and I suspect others have too. Often annoyance goes hand in hand with the learning as rigidly held mindsets are broken.

I find it really sad that pupils feel like failures

So do I. It is important to show the limitations and benefits of statistical data, grading given etc. It's a good lesson because the same limitations and benefits occur elsewhere. But to show the limitations and benefits of something, there has to be an opportunity to experience it, if only to discredit it later.

Cool I actually wish parents were more involved so that they would understand the pointless giving of grades. At consultation evenings I give lots of information about strengths and what they need to do to improve. I give parents the target the school provide and explain that pupils can improve on this or, in some cases, will need to work hard to achieve them.

I find it really sad that pupils feel like failures - I had one girl tell me she had let me down last year and had 'failed at life' because she didn't achieve the grade 4s that she had no chance of reaching anyway.

Even in year 11 it is almost impossible with the new GCSE spec marple !

Even CATs scores aren't very reliable, if the three (now 4) different tests are averaged out to provide flightpaths/ targets/ whatever. My DS would be a case in point with 135 for the number one , about 110 for the verbal one and 85 for the space and shape one!

It is quite common for CATs to be harvested and not reported to parents, as it goes...

We stopped using them at my school because apparently we 'didn't like' the targets they produced!

Said this for years. It restricts ambitious students, and piles pressure on others.

It's the lies, damned lies and statistics at its best.

Though if you'd have seen the AHTs face when I said this you'd have thought I'd grown horns and gone green.

Test the kids. Record scores, percentages and rank.

Plot on bell curve.

You can record that the child is in which centile and report that back to parents.

Trying to make raw scores into grades in any year but 11 is not much better than sticking a wet finger in the breeze. When they do full papers under GCSE conditions (mocks) then we get more accurate grade idea.

Before then....it's educated guesswork at best.

Maybe some parents just want a number. Not realising it's a totally meaningless number. I can tell you what a student is going to get in their GCSE round about the Christmas before they do them. Sometimes the correlate with the targets but often don't. I can't tell you in Year 7 what that child is going to get or what level they are at on the gcse trajectory.
What I can tell you is their CATS results which give me a good indication of spelling and reading ages and whether they are above or below the average score.

It is a closed shop you are capable of joining if you wish to change things from within.

Develop grade boundaries in a discussion which examines how other students, at that stage of their education have performed in similar tests over the years. Show the national graph with the scatter pattern on it. Discuss it. Job done.

Do you know how long the current GCSEs have been around?
How much data do you think there is?
Considering that the specs for the current GCSEs were released shortly before the students who took them were in year 10, can you extrapolate what that means about the tests they did and the tests taken none?

Did you look at the graphs in the document I linked to earlier? I am attaching the Maths one, students who got A* at GCSE got a wide range of grades at A'level. That is so helpful.

They, too, just want us to get on with the job of teaching.

Or like teachers do not want to communicate, in more concrete terms, to the wider public, the actual standard a particular qualification denotes.

As I mooted earlier, the term 'closed shop' comes to mind. I'm surprised you want parents involved in education at all. Well, to be fair, you probably don't want parents involved, except you need our help in either securing more funds or in providing political sway.

We still have the results of the test.

Conveniently reporting very little then.

The exam boards, of course, routinely refuse to be drawn into discussions about grade boundaries, especially in the (many) recently revised specifications. They, too, just want us to get on with the job of teaching.

cuckoo Pseudo GCSE grade or other type of grade. They are about as accurate as each other. With the pseudo GCSE grade you just extrapolate it up the standard progression trajectory to see what the grading reflects. What is your alternative form of grading? How would you establish the grade boundaries?

Slightly riled , yes, by someone who has clearly not heard of any of these people you have been consistently referred to in this thread and your refusal to concede that there is plentiful academic research to support noble, Ofsted and others' viewpoints. Maybe you are in teaching, in fact and are SLT. Only logical explanation.

We can and do assess and teach. FFS.
We just can't assign an accurate GCSE grade to single pieces of work.

Piggy, wow! You're really riled now aren't you? Hit a nerve have I? Thanks for the advice, very interesting to hear your thoughts.

noble, so what are you left with? No assessments, no testing, no exams? How on earth will you match the learning material provided to a child's current level of understanding or stage in learning?

Honestly, if you can't teach then please don't! If you expect children to learn by osmosis then they don't need you to teach them, do they? They can just read books and explore more practically independently...

Since you gave up teaching long ago/ never started cool (not clear whether you have QTS), perhaps you should now either a)re-enter the profession (there's a chronic shortage) and tell us all how to do it or b) write a book to contradict Didau, Wiliam, Christodoulou, Sherrington, McGill et al. Sure it will sell like hot cakes.