To think that, assuming a normal distribution, just under 50% of schools are bound to be "below average"

[Donki]

OK, be gentle! It's my first (and probably last) AIBU - but steam is coming out of my ears!

OFSTED are now to fail any schools that have below average results........

Surely that just means we will constantly end up with nearly 50% of schools being failed.

I know that the average isn't necessarily the middle but it still reads as daft.

Mean, median, mode.

Average wage is a good example. The government love to inflate it by taking into account all the ridiculously high-earners who are paying barely any tax in this country

Milliemae, they explicitly say that CVA is not taken into account.

I dont know hos I can put it more simply

30% is the government standard for 5 A*-C (incl M&E) - anything below that is deemed a failing school and ofsted will be in quicker than a rat up a drain pipe.

So what business would accept a 70% not neeting targets as acceoptable?

slaps self I forgot - we don't *do failure in this culture. And employuers dont lookst D and below as good grades - simply because that is the marker in the government produced statistics.

GCSE are graded A*-G .... roughly you need 3 marks to get a 'G' grade.

Its patronising and demoralising to lesser ability kids to compete in an arena they have no hope of accesing.

And I'll deliberately irriate those with the child genius - you only need 35% for a Maths higher to get a C grade

Trisgarcos

1. the government and the press complain that not enough students achieve a grade C or above at GCSE
2. Simultaneously they complain that since the percentage of students obtaining a grade C or above at GCSE is increasing, the exams must be getting easier. This, they say is a "bad thing" because they must be a "gold standard"

I wish they would decide what they want. It is particularly distressing because they don't seem to see the contradiction.

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that a level 4 at end of KS2 was the expected achievement, not the average.

That is to say, all things being equal, all children are expected to reach that level. Obviously, not all children will do so (examples being children with one or more SN, non English speakers moving to the country age 10, etc etc).

But a school - other than a special school, or one with a particularly disadvantaged pupil intake - that fails to educate the majority of its pupils to that level could reasonably be assumed to be failing, I would have thought?

anthing below a C is not a pass - it's ridiculous to say it is!

fucked up country

30% was value of %5A-Cincl EM that the government/OFSTED used as the
point below which a school was deemed to be failing, regardless of social deprivation and other factors.

This is now changing (if I read the TES aright) to failing schools being those that get below the average value of &FA-Cincl EM regardless of social deprivation etc.(for which I read mean, although the article is not clear)
(And to be fair, OFSTED say that they would not fail a school just for being below average ^so long as the school is making better than average improvement to its %5A-Cincl EM

Everybody - including the teachers want all students to do as well as possible. I am not trying to excuse low expectations where they exist. BUT the social deprivation etc in a catchment area does affect how well a school does.

Donki, I was so happy when I saw your thread title. My DS goes on about this constantly! He says how can the Tories claim to be improving education standards when they can't even do basic maths? It's yet another example of a totally meaningless political standpoint.

Meant DH, not DS, though he would probably spot that it's rubbish too.

Activate
Society, most employers (but not all) and the requirements for progression to 'AS' and A2 levels regard anything below a C as a fail. 'Tis a fact.

However, there are circumstancese where a D (or even E, F, or G) have value. Not the same value as a C - but still a value. And for some of my SN students, an E, F or G is a personal triumph of the highest order. Not a Fail.
There is even a qualification called Entry Level which is below GCSE which has some value for students wanting to go onto vocational college courses.

activate - any grade A* - G is a pass - if you FAIL you get ungraded/unclassified (and some delightful children who try really hard to fail do manage to get U). However you'd have a hard time trying to convince school children that anything less than a C is a pass, which is why so many get switched off from education pretty quicky when they start GCSE work and find that they are struggling to produce work at that level.

The strange thing is when I was at school I was told that GCSEs were being introduced to get away from the two tier system of O-levels and CSEs. Most GCSEs have two tiers of entry (foundation and higher) and most people regard anything less than a C as shit a fail so I do wonder why they bothered... unless it was to lower standards because, as we ALL know, GCSEs are much easier than O-levels

x-posted with Donki. And I agree with the fact that for some SN pupils any grade is a personal triumph, however I have a bloody hard time convincing them of that because they are constantly being told that anything less than a C is rubbish.

most of the kids I work with find education irrelevant

I need to leave I think have had a shit-awful week, had a chair thrown at my head, and I am about to start talking about individual cases which is a huge no-no

:( Activate. It's no fun when that sort of thing happens. Have a good weekend and try to forget about work for a bit.

Activate - definitely try to switch off from it all for the weekend. Hope that you have a better week next week - it's not long til the summer hols at least!

I remember Tony Blair saying that he wanted 75% of students to be "above average". Assuming he meant mean type of average he obviously wanted the remaining 25% to fail so badly that the mean was brought down to that level.
Love it when politicians try and use statistics.

I took my GCSEs in 1993. Anything below a "C" grade was considered a "fail". I got 10 GCSE grade As, and one "D" ( maths). Had to retake to get a "C" to go to university. It's not new to see less than "C" as fail, and "C" (rightly) wouldn't have got me on to "A" level course in that subject..

I hope my (not academic y6) son gets "C" grades in maths and English, when the time comes, so he can access other courses/training.

CRS - I don't think anyone was saying it was new to consider lower grades as a fail....

Society considers anything lower a fail.
A C is needed for progression to many other courses and by employers.

Nonetheless, lower grades can have value - and are not classed as fail by the exam boards. Also, why is it not possible to say that you need a C (or better a B) to go on to A level, without that meaning that a D is a fail? It is a D. It has its own (if lesser) value. Unfortunately, that is not the message that society gives to students.....

But this is a bit of a digression from the new Ofsted criteria.

Troisgarcon : it depends on what the company does and what a normal rate of success for that activity would be.

I'd think that a pharmacetical company, for example, which managed to turn 30% of the molecules they tested into marketable drugs would be raking it in.

A company that proposed a treatment for a hitherto incurable disease and which managed to cure 30% of patients would also be pretty sucessful at what they did.

I agree with you that it sounds rather stupid - they should use the word 'acceptable' instead of 'average'.

When I was doing my teacher training we were shown a very funny newspaper headline about academic achievement (prob from daily mail!) which said something like:

"Government shock - half our children below average"

A grade below c at gcse is to allintents and purposes a fail.

Have you actually read my posts wotnochocs?

Activate - my DS goes to a state primary in a notorious S London borough, an inner-city area, v high level of free school meals, v high level of EAL etc etc, and the results achieved are above the national average (whatever that does mean).

I know there are many many contextual factors that need to be taken into account. But if we agree that whatever the demographic of the school there will be a range of natural ability, then a school should be able to support those with most natural academic potential as well as those who find it harder, and to come out with some sort of representative average performance - IF the starting point in terms of ability is representative. If the school has a 60% SEN (in terms of learning disability) intake, then obviously that is not prepresentative, and needs to be adjusted.

My point is that the premise of the OP is not quite right: if the school has a braodly average intake in terms of ability then it should surely b able to produce broadly average results overall. However, amongst individual children, half may well be below average and half above.

ALL schools could in theory produce average results, and none need to be producing below average or above average - so the premise that 50% of SCHOOLS will automatically be 'below average' is not a correct premise.

I do not disagree with many of your comments - but the question in the OP is different.

Education's a uniquely fucked up world though - one where "satisfactory" in OfstedWonderland isn't good enough. In any other world - satisfactory would be, well, satisfactory - good enough, not brilliant but does the job OK.

Yes if you're blessed with a decent catchment, kids who come to school fed, watered and emotionally cared for - you're likely to be able to get average and above average results. If you have a catchment where kids come to school having had no sleep because they've had to listen to dad batter the shit outta mum overnight, where they're starving hungry, where they're from a background where mum and dad can't read and write and don't see the point in school - average is a gold-medalesque achievement in itself, hell - being able to sit and even TRY to write something is something to be praised.

I worked at a school once that hit the top 100 most improved schools in the country for KS2. Sounds fantastic - and indeed, if you were one of the kids that wasn't deemed a "hopeless case" - it was. If their monitoring hadn't picked up that you could make the magic level 4 or 5 though with the pressure cooking/boosting/cramming/revision/learn how to write a sentence with the structure "Adverbly, the noun verbed adverbly down the adjective noun" and assorted other crap - you were shit out of luck. They basically got there by abandoning the SEN, the behaviour problems, the EAL in a classroom without any resources, with a succession of supply teachers - in essentially the after-school club room. They just didn't care unless you were going to hit their league table goals. Sorry - but although to Ofsted and league table trawlers that would have looked a shiny nice school (and I'm sure as hell that they found some resources for that group the day Ofsted were in) - that's not teaching, that's not education - that's systematically shitting on a less-preferable group of the kids you're charged with educating ALL of. Yet they played the league tables game well - I left because I couldn't reconcil myself morally with how they were achieving things - with the SEN kids being viewed as problems and assorted other crap.

That's the sort of situation that gets created and that is morally fucking reprehensible.