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Original poster

If you have a Y11 DC, what's the school doing about GCSE assessment?

84 replies

GreenTeaPingPong · 14/03/2021 18:49

Can you help me get an idea of what other schools are doing for GCSE assessment? I especially would like to know when they're going to be doing assessments/tests, if they've told you.

I was dismayed to hear from my DS's school on Friday that they'll be doing assessments in class over 8 weeks beginning in one week's time from 22nd March - meaning they'll have had just 10 days of teaching before they start assessing. They've had minimal teaching online, perhaps 5 or 6 live webinars per week since January, and DS has not been very engaged, so I was really hoping that he would be able to have at least a month or 6 weeks of school before being assessed, so that he has a chance to up his game. But now it seems they'll be assessing basically only on the work they've done from Sept - Dec 2020 Sad.

Is your DC's school doing similar?

OP posts:
PettsWoodParadise · 14/03/2021 21:08

Every school is taking a different approach. DD’s school say they will be assessing on a combination of their stage 1 mocks, essays, tests done during lockdown and then a series of tests in late Spring that may be past GCSE papers, or possibly these government mini-tests but as they haven’t seen the latter yet they can’t judge.

Talking to teacher friends they want something more solid to hang the results on other than just their opinion, the chances of parental backlash is very much a driver behind putting our Y11s through more testing and uncertainty.

Original poster
GreenTeaPingPong · 14/03/2021 20:14

Thanks for the info ImpatientAnn. I think that approach might be best for many students but not for my DS, unfortunately.

OP posts:
ImpatientAnn · 14/03/2021 19:32

The exam board provided assessments are not new material - they will simply be selecting some past exam questions from their bank of past questions. Most teachers also have access to this bank as we pay a small fee to the exam board each year for the privilege so we won’t gain much from waiting.

ImpatientAnn · 14/03/2021 19:30

I am a secondary teacher. We will start our assessments in my subject at a similar time to your child and will also do them over several weeks.

We will be revising key topics then testing those topics - I’d imagine your school will be doing the same. There are lots of small assessments and so less to revise for each paper.

I suspect this will be better for the children then several weeks of revising then one long assessment at the end of ten weeks teaching.

Trust the people teaching and assessing your child - they want to give them the best grades they can.

Original poster
GreenTeaPingPong · 14/03/2021 19:18

I just checked the DfE guidance here
and it says that exam boards will provide assessment materials at the end of March. No idea why DS's school is going to start assessment on 22nd March, it seems stupid. He won't even get the Easter holidays to do revision for the earliest assessments.

OP posts:
Original poster
GreenTeaPingPong · 14/03/2021 19:08

My DS had mocks planned for January but they were cancelled. So he will go into 6th form college having zero experience of any kind of exam, except for Y6 SATs.

OP posts:
Lockdown2021 · 14/03/2021 19:02

DD had assessments in Jan, sat at home and remotely invigilated. They will be doing another set of assessments after Easter, but a week or two after term starts. They all have current working grades and aspirational grades. We’ve been told they will use a variety of evidence to justify the final grade. So there is a lot of additional testing going on at the moment, e.g short tests, essays written in class so that they will have a lot of recent evidence to potentially use. I’m expecting that most of the evidence used will be from year 11 and not year 10. Also told, to get an 8 or 9 for example not all the evidence needs to be at that grade (but presumably more than 50% would be?). This is an independent school.

TeenMinusTests · 14/03/2021 18:56

They have some formal exams in the 2 weeks before the May half term.
1 exam per GCSE, except the double award Science which has 3 papers.
They can use info from y10 as well as y11.

There are other in-class assessments between now and then, dependent on the subject.

On Friday we received a very clear document outlining:
a) what info they already have that they can use (eg y10 assessments/exams, y11 Nov mocks, various other bits)
b) in-class assessments upcoming (general, not by date)
c) paper numbers / topics for the final fortnight

YellowDaffidols · 14/03/2021 18:55

Awaiting final guidance from DoE about what exactly will be required, and counted.
But yes, judging from what I've had go through the photocopying pile this week, an assessment per subject per week starting ASAP, so some can be disregarded, seems to be a recurring theme.