‘What does the dramatic fall in GCSE grades tell us? That private schools were gaming the system’

[Bougiebliss]

Carrying on from the A level grades thread
this article was in the Guardian this afternoon, same in Telegraph but I don’t have a token.
it seems like GCSE inflation was more pronounced even than A levels in private school. Maybe some teachers can explain what happened and the difficulties - i did learn lots on the other thread but still left with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole business.

amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/25/gcse-grades-private-schools-inflate-

My dd's private school has better grades this year than each of the last 3.

On initial reports my comp school I teach at had better results this year than last years TAGs (measuring 5 results at grade 4 and above) than last year. And so they bloody should teachers have gone above and beyond in terms of intervention they deserve it too.

I am not sure about gaming the system but at DDs Private school last year her teachers really pushed her to get 9s across the board. Her history teacher for example told her that she was on course for an 8 but if she took a couple more exams and scored above a certain mark on both he could give her a 9.
He had a class of 10 and numerous resources which most State schools probably didn’t

@crowdedout same here. I'm actually a Guardian reader, but sometimes their knee-jerk responses really piss me off. No doubt some private schools outrageously hiked their grades last year. As did some state schools. But plenty of schools in both sectors worked bloody hard to follow the (shit) guidelines and ensure that their results were fair. This year our private school's results were better than last year's. I'm sure there will be plenty of others in the same boat.

Exactly the same with mine. This year we did even better than last year - which also was consistent with the three years before.

@romanieuntdomus here is a similar article from yesterday’s TES if that is less ‘knee jerky’
www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/gcse-results-2022-bigger-fall-top-grades-private-schools

Or The Telegraph, not know for debasing private education without good reason
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/25/gcse-results-day-2022-private-schools-see-biggest-drop-top-grades/

We got the same % of top grades this year as last year.

Private schools are too disparate to lump them all into one click bait headline (as are state schools). You're not even comparing the same subjects and boards for one thing. Apples and oranges!

Better than a head of dept I know who awarded students the grade they got from sitting an exam despite only having a fraction of the usual teaching. Last years kids at that school got the worst grades the school had ever seen.

Some of the reporting here is a bit confused.
Consider two schools:
School A had 80% "high grades" and dropped to 70%.
School B had 30% "high grades" and dropped to 25%.

Which has had the sharper decline?
A has dropped 10 percentage points. Its score fell by 12.5% of what it was.
B has dropped 5 percentage points. Its score fell by 16.7% of what it was.

Clearly there is some generalising, like with all data, but the facts are clear and uncomfortable IMHO - at A level and GCSE’s last year enough private schools to show up in the data recorded much higher results than their pupils could gain in comparison this year.

Well, the grades were deliberately set so that they would be lower this year! I know for a fact that in the awful year of 2020 (with CAGs and the Mutant Algorithm), some results at the independent school where I work were adjusted upwards by the exam board as we had not been generous enough.

With TAGs last year, we were told to provide "best evidence of best performance" for students. If they could produce work at a high standard, then that's what they got. Everything had to be evidenced and documented and checked; it was a long process that took forever. We did give students lots of chances, perhaps more than some other schools. But all the schools that I know were playing by exactly the same set of rules. I'll agree that independent schools probably spent more time/energy/person-hours on the process because they have more resources for that.

@PhotoDad Yes sure they were purposefully downgraded this year, but why did that not show up equally across all types of schools? I am sure you as a teacher were entirely ethical, but it appears some in the sector were not.

So does the private school dd used to go for. Both their a levels and gcse grades are up, especially at the highest levels.

Grammar schools, which also have a bigger cluster around grade 7, did not show the same level of regression as independents.

The system last year was a mess. Schools worked hard to justify grades, but there can't be validation when there is no coherence.

Yes, it was a mess. State and private sectors had similar drops if you look at a percentage change rather than the percentage point change. (As my post upthread about School A and School B was meant to illustrate!)

@TheFallenMadonna do you have a theory as to why they showed less regression?

I'm not even sure where the journalists got their data from anyway, I've just gone to check our schools and GCSEs results aren't available for our state school in 2020/2021 - the gov.uk says this

"Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the data we publish:
Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, most exams and assessments did not take place in 2019/20 or 2020/21. As a result of this, the government announced that it would not publish school or college level results data in autumn 2020 or autumn 2021."

In my DS's private school this year - 9 grades went down by 1.8%, 8 grades went up by 4%, 7 are broadly the same.

There's a very long thread on this topic for A level results.

I know that our (private) school used the normal distribution of results for the 2020 grades, based on the previous two years. The private school bashing gets a bit repetitive at times. (And I say that as a state school product myself).

@underneaththeash I know someone at The Guardian, let me ask where they are from and get back to you.

Data was published about national (and regional) statistics and trends, just not about individual schools!

In your school A and B examples, grammar schools would also be school A. You can see the difference between grammar and independents.

@PhotoDad I would imagine that as so many of you decent teachers on here saw rises in grades this year, the huge disparity might be in the very top private schools that are under enormous pressure as they live or die on their results? So they have skewed the figures for the whole sector?

I'm not bashing private schools. If anything I have more of an issue with selective state schools. But when considering different assessment systems, this kind of data adds to the picture.

It's such a shame for the pupils who's marks were given in 2021, but I can't imagine any employer risking taking any notice of the grades awarded, especially from private schools. The high amount of cheating that clearly went on, nasalt, has rendered the entire years grades pointless. As long as they ace their next qualification, they'll be fine though.