Has DS’s school disadvantaged the students by the way they tested GCSES?

[quote Bigblueone]@dancealittleclosertome the teacher said they’d not seen the results until yesterday.[/quote]
Technically the “results” wouldn’t have been seen. TAGs we’re sent off to the boards. Then the boards sent them back as “results”. There was a possibility that some could have been changed after moderation but the exams officer would have been told and SLT informed. So I suppose in theory teachers might not have been informed of any changes. But changes should be rare, previously discussed and unlikely if the sampling was approved.

Private schools gave better remote learning

Nope.

Agree with @BumbleMug that each school had a centre policy which was checked with the regulator.

OP, do bear in mind that teachers at an average sized secondary school may well have had to award in excess of 200 marks. They can't be expected to recall every single one, hence a teacher asking your dc to show his result.

OP the advice from ofqual was for teachers to assess pupils, provide evidence and submit a grade that would be 'the best a pupil could achieve' based on evidence.

The teachers will have seen the grades when they went through reviews with SLT ahead of being submitted to exam boards.

I'm an exams officer so am pretty familiar with the guidance.

Even if the other schools marked an assessment, the rest of the evidence for the pupil will have been taken into account for the final TAG

[quote Bigblueone]@BumbleMug something very odd is going on. Another teacher also made him show her his grade as she didn’t know what he’d got either…[/quote]
Very odd indeed and I can’t begin to imagine what the school has done. TAGs are the only method available for GCSE’s this year and literally stands for Teacher Assessed Grade. There is even guidance on how teachers can use holistic approaches to come to the grades. If your schools teachers genuinely haven’t ‘assigned’ the grades then they’ve broken many rules. If I was you I’d ask to see the schools TAG centre policy. Every exam centre has to upload one to the board supervising them and in it it had to clearly state their methods of assessing grades. If it’s not on the schools website you can request it and they have to provide it.

It’s remote learning that has widened the gap, not the assessments and grading.

DS school had two weeks of 'exams'. Two exams most days of 2-2.5 hours each. No mocks.
My nephew has been having 'test and teach' mini classroom tests for weeks.
A friend's academy school warned parents that some DC would be called back into school in early June for more tests depending on individual exam results at the end of May. Another bite of the cherry so to speak.
The disparity has been ridiculous.

We were told by SLT the students had to know what evidence we had used. I suppose that counts if they know what assessments were included even if they didn't know the marks.

Lots of schools didn't allow students to see any of the evidence. Ours didn't. They sat exams and had no clue about the marking till today.

We cross trust marked some moderation copies of papers but not blind marking on a whole cohort. The marking process isn't the issue.

You can ask which evidence was used towards the grade given and DC should have seen it beforehand. There should be no indication of grade given on any work from March onwards but seeing marks is OK.

If they were basing the grades on the exam scores, it is definitely a good thing to ensure that the marking of those exams is fair. When you're marking the work of a child you know well, objectivity with respect to the mark scheme can be hard.

Is the school part of an academy trust? I've heard of similar, where exams are marked by other schools in the trust to avoid bias. It's not ideal, but arguably closer to a normal assessment.

Schools had to say in their centre policy how they would mitigate against potential bias in assessing work, and blind marking is useful for this when the assessment is based on exam scripts. It's how "real" exams are marked. We also had our marking moderated by another school for that reason, and we moderated them. Grading the marked work is another matter, and that is what has been so difficult given that there was absolutely no consistency between assessments used by different schools.

You can appeal. Google it for more info.

I'd say the teacher misrepresented what actually happened. Someone in their school will have known the grades awarded. The leadership team and subject leads had to sign off on them.

If the exam board was not happy with the approach they would have had a deeper sampling period or gone to the school to interview staff.

I know schools have had different approaches, but there was no guidance issued to instruct us more than "gather evidence such as....." Please be pissed off at the government and not the staff that spent months doing this. I worked more in our 3 weeks of assessment than I ever have working for the exam boards on top of my normal school role.

That is not the proper process, who told you that's what happened?

A small sample from some schools was taken to "moderate". No board took in marks and moderated for all subjects so someone has misinterpreted or misrepresented something somewhere.