TES; top grades fall dramatically at private schools

[Bougiebliss]

Yesterday’s TES

www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/levels-2022-top-grades-fall-private-schools?amp

Hmmmm… so what changed in their teaching over the last year?
This feels really distasteful not only for the hard working children in schools that didn’t inflate, but also for those children who got on to courses based on the inflated grades and are presumably struggling.
I can’t help feeling that if this was something local comps had done there would be more outrage.

This is a TES story from 2021. Private schools massively inflated grades, far more so than state schools. Those asking "where's the evidence" well here it is: www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/levels-2021-rise-three-times-more-private-schools?amp

Dear god that article can't decide whether to use percentage points or percentage increase and freely switches between the two mid argument.

I have already stated that grades in private schools were inflated.
But saying that all TAGs were inflated is incorrect.

In one class during TAGS I had 9 level 9 grades, normally I would get 5. By th evidence that I had (coursework, mocks and class work) all 9 would get a level 9 grade, I know that 4 (statistically) would probably drop to an 8.
Which 4 should I have chosen to drop?
I and other didn't inflate any grades I/we used the evidence that we had at the time

I do love the argument that private schools got much higher grades than normal during covid because they were so good at providing online learning. It suggests that the most effective thing for them to do would be to shut down their in person provision!

Indeed!

Private schools did do exams. They did a lot of assessments in exam conditions. So why anyone says they haven't done formal exams I didn't know. All the children in the last 2 years sat some sort of exam under strict exam conditions

I can vouch for this. My son was due to take his GCSEs as covid hit in March 2020. He was very unimpressed that some of his friends at state schools had no assessments after lockdown started whereas he was still taking exams up to May half term.

They had French orals by video and various maths and science exams. They'd receive the paper by email at 10 and have to scan them and return them by 12. The teachers tried to pick questions that weren't easily searchable on the internet. They watched the kids complete it by video link for some maths papers so pupils couldn't confer.

A levels were a mixed bag for my son's year. I think it's important to differentiate between UCAS predictions and realistic predictions. School is at pains to point out that UCAS grades are a marketing exercise if the pupil did their best on the day (in other words, their highest potential mark). They are not the same as TAGs (for last year).

I don't recall school giving my son actual grade predictions for his A levels, beyond a % every half term which is helpful but of limited use without an average grade boundary by subject.

@FrippEnos teachers and press. Private schools in particular inflated them and some pupils from state schools were hard done by.

Gosh if I’d been awarded my teacher assed grades I would have gone to an Oxbridge uni, predicted are often higher.

What is fascinating about the question of whether private schools offered a superior service during covid is the assumption that "of course they did".

If you look at the graph comparing top grades year on year, it is interesting to compare 2019, the last year of exams, with 2022. We know that top grades have increased since then.

Academies: 23.7% to 35%, a relative increase of 47.7%

Comps: 20% to 30.7%, a relative increase of 53.5%

Independent schools: 44% to 58%, a relative increase of 31.8%

Wouldn't we expect that if private schools provided the best online provision and the least disruption due to covid that they'd have made a bigger, not smaller improvement in reaching those top grades?

That's very interesting, @noblegiraffe .

Personally, I think the perception that private schools were "better" at providing remote learning is largely based on the perception that they were more likely to offer a full timetable of video lessons. However, that presumes that video lessons were the best replacement for f2f learning, and I'm not convinced that that was necessarily the case.

My dd didn't like remote learning much - she is very extroverted and finds a classroom environment much more engaging than online learning. You might assume that she would be the kind of kid who would have welcomed live video lessons as the next best option but she actually really hated them, and found them much less useful than other forms of online learning. She just didn't find the online lessons engaging, didn't find that they allowed for much meaningful interaction with teachers or with other students, didn't enable her to make the most of the advantages of remote learning while equally failing to replicate the advantages of f2f. Luckily, her state secondary offered a much wider and more varied range of online learning materials than the full timetable of live video lessons offered by the local private school. DD would have completely lost the will to live if she had had to sit through hours and hours of Microsoft Teams lessons every day!

but these were not predicted they were assessed.

But you haven't answered how I could have marked the pupils down or which 4 I should have marked down so that grades were not "inflated"

I am also going to point out that at no point during TAGs were new grade boundaries ever published.
There was just some weak shit general guidance about what the grades might look like.

The borderline DC were given the benefit of the doubt. In exam conditions they would not have all got the grades predicted. It really has meant some DC are not as good as they think they are and it’s a headache for universities and those DC coming up behind. In my view we need a massive reset. For exam grades and what is required at university.

@Lennybenny - disagree with this. I do teach English at a pretty prestigious independent academic school. I would say we spoon feed far less given some of the booklets/ model answer type resources I regularly see on edutwitter. One example (from a good teacher) was a booklet for a A level Shakespeare play. All preplanned with questions/ tasks etc . We teach our students to be much more independent than that and choose syllabuses that’s reward that also. It’s precisely because we are independent and academic that we have the freedom to do this. Of course there are many reasons why students at independent schools generally do better but I would argue that it’s the exact oppoof spoonfeeding.

Musmerian I agree. By the sound of it, my son's at a similar school to yours. If there was any spoon feeding for A levels, I missed it.

The teachers are demanding and provide a good level of feedback but there's no pre-prepared/model answers etc.

@lot123 @Musmerian I have read a fair amount on mumsnet from Uni lecturers saying state children tend to be independent learners and flourish at Uni. So not sure these booklets you are talking about are detrminental long term if that is how you are suggesting all state schools teach I know a fair few secondary state teachers and are amazed by how much they enjoy talking with their pupils around their subjects and how they talk about drawing the best of different types of children. So I don’t recognise the picture you are painting I am afraid.

In my subject our proportion of A* grades rose at A Level this year to 33% - much higher than our CAGs. Bog standard inner city comp. We did not inflate.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm simply questioning the widely applied assumption that all private school kids are spoonfed. It's not our experience.

I'm not judging state school teaching as I don't have recent experience of it. And frankly I think some model answers can be a really good teaching aid.

If true that private schools massively over inflated their grades that’s absolutely despicable. Will there be consequences?

no, short answer.

Whose children go to these schools?

I saw a graph that showed that private schools massively inflated their a grades Roth the TAG system. If that’s true it’s outrageous. As if they aren’t privileged enough 🙄. Also in our city the private schools do a different type of gcse which is apparently easier. What’s that all about?

I’m more impressed by good grades obtained from a more struggling school or a state school. Internally I see sending your kid private as cheating and I’m not impressed by a private school child’s swanky grades even if I pretend to be. Dh got to Cambridge from a rural comp his head teacher was so excited first child they had got in. Both his parents left school at 16 and had blue collar jobs.

I think it is OTT to see it as cheating.
What about tutoring to get into grammar schools? Is that cheating?
What about grammar schools themselves?
What about private tutoring within the standard comp system?
What if a parent has the skills to tutor a child themselves?

A few independent schools had massively inflated grades last year, but not all. There have been threads on this. I'm sure some state schools will have overinflated too and others didn't.

Many private schools used to do iGCSEs because they were more demanding than the old GCSE. I don't know why they are still doing them.

People love this story as it feeds their sense that private school kids are very privileged, which of course they are.

However there were both state schools and private schools that inflated grades. My DC school must have been an outlier because their grades were slightly lower and as a consequence some pupils missed out, in one case a place at Durham.

What I would be interested to know is this - have these pupils, whether state or private, struggled as a result of this grade inflation? Is there any data on this? Are students dropping out?

I would guess the answer is no actually because the difference between an A and and A star isn't that much. We have reached a point where we actually don't know who the brightest pupils are because the grade levels are too generous.

I am allowed my opinion and that is it. I’m SO impressed by kids that make it against the odds. My father is a retired teacher and volunteers at his local comp to prep kids from non university backgrounds for Oxbridge interviews. If you’ve been to an expensive school with adoring parents and get good grades - whatever. Don’t impress me much!

Of course you are allowed your opinion. And I agree getting the same grades from a standard comp is more impressive than from a private school.

However, I'm interested in where you internally draw the cheating line. Only at private schools, or at other schools / methods of tutoring?