Grade inflation and leading independent schools in London and beyond

It was not only Independent schools that inflated grades. The daughter of a colleague of mine got all 4s and 5 s in her GCSEs at a London State School (real exams). Her mother was astounded when she got AAB for her A levels.

Yes many schools did this, state and independent, disgraceful behaviour and did the children no favours. My DDs school didn't, in fact their grades were lower than normal, evidently the head was worried they would be found out if they inflated.

Presumably no checking was done afterwards? Another big failure.

I feel for all the students, like my DD, who missed out on their 1st choice uni because of this. I wonder how many dropped out of that course.

"And the truth is that a lot of independent schools and grammars continued to provide proper teaching online and have rich, involved parents more likely to be working from home/tutoring on the side as well." workisnotawolf

Very true. Our online provision was excellent. On the whole we provided very well crafted, online lessons that were well adapted to the medium of communication. In discussion with colleagues in the state sector we went well beyond them in terms of not only the amount of the material provided, but also the quality of the provision.

"As an academic, I've seen a massive drop-out and failure rate in this cohort, which came in with inflated teacher-awarded grades for very little work and expected this to continue at university. And, yes, a lot of these students were educated in independent schools. " GCAcademic

I've heard from a couple of sources, (but have not seen any statistics to either confirm or dispute the notion) that students from Independent schools have a higher drop out rate in their first year of university. If this is true then it could well be because in many fee paying schools, students are spoon fed and have their hands held far more than it the state sector. We virtually write their personal statements for them. Again, only the experience of my school, other independent schools are available.

No I'm not at EC

"I bet your “boss” is not actually a good teacher himself - is he a City slicker suit type." workisnotawolf

No, they are not a city slicker suit type and I have my suspicions as to how good a teacher they are/were. I've seen lots of cover work that's been set by our staff that are works of art. Well thought out, differentiated material with a good variety of tasks. I covered a lesson for the head that was along the lines of "Read pages 187/188" and make notes."

"We need a robust whistle blowing process across these sectors. " workisnotawolf

We do indeed, but when Ofqual were informed by us that the guidelines set out by both them and our examination board weren't being followed, Ofqual really didn't want to know. I guess in spring 2020 they were all running around like headless chickens and teachers creating more work for them was the last thing they wanted. Essentially they stuck their fingers in their ears and said "Whistle? What whistle?"

shock

“Yes, indeed, very interesting, and not unsurprising to me. As an academic, I've seen a massive drop-out and failure rate in this cohort, which came in with inflated teacher-awarded grades for very little work and expected this to continue at university. And, yes, a lot of these students were educated in independent schools. These schools have done their students few favours in the long (or medium) run, but perhaps I guess they were just as interested in their own statistics and league table positions, if not more.”

Same applies to some grammars but it is very difficult to prove anything after the event. And the truth is that a lot of independent schools and grammars continued to provide proper teaching online and have rich, involved parents more likely to be working from home/tutoring on the side as well. In addition, the whole cohort has suffered no end of resilience/mental health challenges as well which can lead to entitled behaviour. It is the job of university’s now to plug the gap as well -oh wait, a lot of them do not have the funding to do so! Strikes/not marking etc. - how is this going to help this cohort?
We as adults have failed them and time to admit that and support them through it at all stages - school, uni, graduate employment. Rather than write them off!

@quiteoldad are you saying you're currently a teacher at EC? That's quite a revelation you're making there...

@quiteoldad - I think the issue is your crazy CEO style boss who just cares about the money flowing in. This is not typical across the whole sector. I bet your “boss” is not actually a good teacher himself - is he a City slicker suit type.
Teachers should be able to challenge management in all schools, state or independent. The same applies to the NHS. We need a robust whistle blowing process across these sectors.

It's one I often make, even after working for over 18 years in that (the independent) sector, and nearly all of that for the school cited above.

independant
Strange spelling mistake

Yes, indeed, very interesting, and not unsurprising to me. As an academic, I've seen a massive drop-out and failure rate in this cohort, which came in with inflated teacher-awarded grades for very little work and expected this to continue at university. And, yes, a lot of these students were educated in independent schools. These schools have done their students few favours in the long (or medium) run, but perhaps I guess they were just as interested in their own statistics and league table positions, if not more.

Interesting (and shocking) story, quitoldad!

We will probably see some smaller private schools closing over the next few years (falling birthrates, COL and stuff like VAT), and I think there will be limited sympathy in part because we saw some private schools engaging in this kind of behavior. Unfair, in many cases, perhaps, as the schools that are hit by the above issues and forced to close may not necessarily be the ones that did unethical stuff during COVID.

I've only just found this thread, but I might as well share my experience of being a teacher in an independant school in spring 2020. During that period our department spent a lot of time looking at large amounts of student data including the historical records of improvement from mock to actual exam. Based on that and a very good understanding of our pupils' abilities, we came up with a set of predicted grades for the cohort. We had sprinkled a little bit of fairy dust over those grades, but not so much as to be unreasonable. These were submitted to SLT who insisted that we rework them and inflate them greatly. Normally in our cohort there would have been two or three students that achieved a grade 3. They were upgraded on the very first amendment. There was a lot of pressure put on us to "up" all our predictions. The quote from management was "We'll bump them up, let the boards bring them down, let the boards take the blame."

Over about a month, there was a lot of negotiation between management and our department and there were at least three iterations of the grades, with each new set of grades being more optimistic than the last. We had hour-long department meeting after department meeting, reworking the figures after each time they had been sent back to us because they were not what the Boss wanted.

Eventually the head and our department settled for a set of grades and whilst we as a department felt that they were too optimistic to be realistic, we settled for those and we even got a written agreement that these were the grades that would be sent off to the board.

At that stage no one knew that the grades submitted would be the ones that would be awarded.

When they came back, we discovered that despite agreement from SLT that the grades we'd agreed upon would be sent off, they had been altered upwards without us being told.

When we returned to school in the autumnm and asked the head about this the response was simply "I'm the boss, I'll do what I think is best for the school, if there's any fallout, I'll take the "rap"".

So, in our case it was simply a smash and grab. Having seen that such actions could be got away with in 2020, we repeated the exercise in 2021. By then our departmet was so browbeaten that it wasn't worth arguing and our department meetings that required us to evaluate grades simply consisted of us saying "Yeah, whatever the boss wants. You want us to find evidence for a grade 8? I'm sure we can cook something up". Sad but that's how it happened.

That period was the low point in my teaching career. I felt that integrity and fairness had been sacrificed and that we had been involved in a smash and grab to get what you can, while you can. Whilst it is a great school with great kids, who I love teaching (each morning I look forward to going into work to teach them) on this occassion it was the "grown ups" that screwed up.

I felt sorry for the schools who had been fair and realistic about their students' abilities, for they were the ones that lost out and hats off to those schools whose predictions were within the margins of previous performance.

Of course we weren't the only ones that looted, and that accounts for the overall inflation of the grades.

If you can think about it from a low grade boundaries perspective...

if normally the A grade is at 75% but the 2020 paper was at 65% then everyone who would normally have got a grade B was suddenly an A,, assuming they were performing at a normal level in less than normal circumstances. In the majority of cases we would perhaps have expected less than average performance but if you've been taught the whole time, you are massively advantaged over those who haven't been. It's possibly an over-simplistic way of deciding those grades - but a legitimate one based on the published grade boundaries from the 2020 paper rather than trying to make up your own as a school. Remember - if you as a parent see your child's paper, see they got 65% and then look up the grade boundaries, you will know your child could/should have got an A. If the school gave your child a B because they were trying to play to what they considered 'normal', they would be opening themselves up to legal challenge because you know that there will be others out there who got 65% and got given the A.

You also need to remember that we were threatened with our schools being the ones that were picked for scrutiny - so a school that just made up grades (which I think is what you are suggesting) was leaving itself way open to problems if picked. It was a small percentage of schools picked, but I know we came up in a couple of subjects (not mine) and had to send off all our evidence. So scrutiny happened. Not for every school in every subject, but it happened.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, it's very helpful. Just curious, why do you think teachers at NLCS concluded that their students results were suddenly so much better than many years past?

Presumably whatever testing they engaged in told them that?

I do think it is worth remembering that private schools on the whole continued teaching through lockdown (we even managed online co-curricular activities which was no mean feat, believe me) which didn't happen in many state schools during the first lockdown and if my children's school is anything to go by, barely happened in the second. Children already at an advantage with smaller class sizes would have gained an even greater advantage as a result. Couple that with low grade boundaries on the 2020 November papers which many of us used for our exams last year and more people have higher grades than ever before. And of course, there is always difference in cohorts - some years you get all As, some years you don't.

I am not suggesting that such schools didn't over egg the pudding. But there is a lot that happened that would have given those students huge advantage, given the overall situation.

I think you can still question the extent of the improvement and e.g. that the same NLCS did worse than St Paul's in 2019 GCSE but better than St Paul's in 2021 A level but, yeah, as above the cohort point is a fair one.

I think it is deeply insulting to suggest that private school teachers set out to improve outcomes for their students over and above what said students might have deserved, That somehow we lack professionalism either because we want ourselves to look amazing or because we are incapable of impartiality or even just incapable of following rules.

It was a difficult time for private schools largely due to the fact we knew any over and above performance would be questioned and because we are very much subject to the threat of legal intervention should anything go wrong in the eyes of a parent who has paid for something they didn’t get.

I can’t explain the results mentioned in the OP. I can say, however, that in my school at least, we worked hard to give the children the results they deserved and we were prepared to fail students and did fail students who we know would have failed on a normal year. Nonetheless, we still had a larger number of top grades than normal but that also happened in the state sector. We worked hard, so did the students. There was perhaps bias in how some schools set about examining their students, reducing papers, being specific about revision requirements, testing, retesting with the same questions whilst others just gave the last paper available and used that year’s grade boundaries (and the 2020 grade boundaries were very low in my subject). There was probably localised bias in how every school went about it at some level.

I am not sure how it could have been made genuinely fair across the board in the circumstances. It is what it is. Schools who have deliberately over egged their pudding have made their futures very difficult when it comes to living up to the past. Inspection bodies are potentially going to have a field day in the coming years.

I assume you are comparing A level results with A level results from 2019 to 2021, however it is the cohort that matters in this instance and it is worth pointing out that the same girls achieved exceptional results in 2019.

yeah, I mean, between 2019 & 2021 NLCS went from being an undoubtedly high achieving school [e.g. just outside the top couple of dozen schools] to being the flat best or maybe second best in the country [based on this measure of the % of top A level grades] .

is it common, or even heard of, for a school's relative ranking to improve so much in such a short space of time? maybe it is, I can't say the rankings I ever spend too much time poring over. but it at least feels a bit dubious.

He’s an ambitious man. Is regularly in the papers. Can’t comment as to whether he’s a narcissist but the focus on exam results is disproportionate- although I note the graphs showing the 5 year trends (that featured prominently previously) are nowhere on the website now……

@ChnandlerBong - what do you mean by “some heads are after one thing only….”? Is this man a narcissist attention seeker or is he just naive with limited PR experience? Or is he a Boris Johnson type who subscribes to “no publicity is bad publicity”? I am rather intrigued why anyone would have chosen to go on record in this instance.

What is up at NLCS? Are they not usually quite professional and media savvy and well funded? Are there deeper issues going on there?

Will ISI inspect any of these schools and is this a red flag issue or will it be totally ignored?
I have noticed a lot of Ofsted inspections happening in the last 3 months in our area. I hope the ISI is equally busy.