‘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-

I actually meant schools who are comparing this year with 2019. This year was designed to be better. A school that is standing still will have better results. It's meaningless. Congratulate kids and staff for their hard work, yes. Delight in individual success and progression, yes. But that's it.

Were they appealing on the basis that the school had not followed the guidelines that had been set?
Because that is what they ought to be have been doing given what you have said.

I've seen some that have certainly not made that clear.

I don't understand why on the news yesterday there was an piece about how GCSE results had dropped compared to last year, the government announced that was going to be the case months ago.

Fair point but in a normal year not everyone is happy with their grades. If you are being completely fair then you are going to disappoint some pupils/ parents. Parents aren’t always realistic about their child’s ability. All appeals were explained to parents and they were shown evidence which they were accepted. We were given the impression our marks were going to be heavily scrutinised and we prepared large folders of evidence to back up our TAGs. Had we known every grade would be accepted at face value I might have been tempted to be more generous. I had 2 lovely, hard working classes but I tried to be as fair as possible. It’s clear that SOME private schools did not follow this process or how else can you explain the bigger decrease?

Then not were

Some years ago I taught a somewhat unusual class in that during the course of their A-level studies each of them had been top of the class in a few topic tests and each had also been bottom. I didn't know who would get an A*, but knew that a few of them would.
If they had been my class in 2021 they would each have got an A*, since what we were asked to do last year was give them the grade that we had evidence for. In 2020 we are asked to say which grade they were most likely to get in which case they would have each have got an A.
This year probably 5/15 would have got an A*.

That's not gaming the system, the system was an ass.

Yes, practically impossible to be completely fair.

Although I'm not denying that some schools did artificially inflate grades, there is another possible explanation for the disproportionate decrease. During the very disrupted 2020/21 year, private schools arguably had more resource to better support students during pupil and teacher absences. It's therefore not surprising that their pupils did better in whatever assessments were used to determine the grades, this widening the gap. This year, when things have been less disrupted, the impact of that extra resource may have been less significant - so the decrease in grades may have been disproportionately greater in private school results?

Private schools don’t need to game any system. Although you could argue that going to one effectively IS gaming a flawed system.

My children are at a private school.

Given:
Highly focussed students
Pushy parents
small class sizes
social pressure to succeed

Any child will do better in a classic private school environment. I expect mine to do well because they have been handed it all.

This is the truth.

@WeIoveyouMissHannigan it is absolutely not true that any child will do better in a classic private school environment. If a child is very bright and motivated, they will generally do brilliantly in either sector. For the more average, you are probably right.

Welove all of that happens at my dds single sex state school bar the small classes. They are extremely pushy. Their results are better than the local all girls private school. Smoke and mirrors. But if you are happy to fork out crack on.

Whike there will have been individual independent schools thay played fair, the data shows that as a group they did not. It's possible that some inflated their grades so much thay it has dragges up the curve foe the rest of the sector. Perhaps we need a list of the schools with the biggest disparities to be published.

Just because there is a big disparity it does not mean that schools did not follow the rules.
The rules were very different in each of the last 3 years. In 2020 schools were supposed to award the grade that students were most likely to get.

In 2021 they were supposed to award the best grade they have evidence for.
In 2022 there were exams with the government pre-determining that the proportion of each grade would be somewhere between 2019 and 2022 levels. Abandoning any pretence that the grade awarding system is criteria referenced.

As I tried to illustrate earlier the same class in each of those years could fairly and correctly be awarded completely different grades.

@basilmint there was a list published of the worst 'offenders', and it's pretty clear that a small minority of schools did significantly inflate their grades (ie the ones whose grades were ridiculously out of sync with previous years). But they're a small minority - and some state schools did the same. Given that there are other factors that could explain the bigger decrease this year compared with state schools (eg more stable teaching during Covid, better online provision), I don't think you can possibly claim that the 'data shows that as a group private schools didn't act fair'. That might be what the data shows - but it's absolutely not a given.

They should be named and shamed. A local very pushy state school had extraordinary results in 2021 Dh and I were 🙄 at their sixth form open day where they showed the a levels for last few years. 2021 Was so obviously ridiculous.We avoided that school as proved the management was corrupt. You Can’t witter on about worthy values to parents with the evidence of your cheating out there for all to see!

@MsTSwift it's not all 'smoke and mirrors' - it depends on the schools, surely. It sounds like your DDs' school is doing better than the local private - fine. (Though I personally wouldn't want a school that was 'extremely pushy'.) In our case, the private gets significantly better results (eg a much higher GCSE 9-7 percentage) than the local boys' or girls' superselective grammars - and (more importantly for us) the extra curricular provision is in a different league. That's not smoke and mirrors. But it depends so much on individual schools, that I wouldn't try to make a state v private generalisation.

So why did the kids do better when the teachers were giving the grades out compared to an actual exam year? That’s where the gaming the system comes into it. That it looks like they didn’t follow the rules as strictly as state schools and instead gave the kids higher grades than they’d have achieved had they sat an exam.

whereas my local state school their gcse results have gone up this year, suggesting maybe they were too strict with their teacher assessed grades. And that’s certainly what parents with kids at the school I know were saying. Someone I know their kid got a U. He’d got Ds throughout all the classroom assessments and coursework, when asked why they gave him a U they said someone the previous year had got a U so the rules determined someone the following year had to get a U. 🤷‍♀️

Also depends on your finances! Private would be doable but painful for us no way I’m selling my house for the (quite negligible for us anyway) advantages of private school when I have a happy sporty teen with nice friends and string of 9s!! Very area and child dependent though you can’t generalise.

@WeIoveyouMissHannigan I am surmising from your post that you are a first time user of private education otherwise you would know a private education is a guarantee of exactly diddly squat. The majority of my friends from my private school days have very normal jobs with low-ish incomes. Some have mental health problems. Some have had difficult marriages. Some have been in trouble with the law. Others have done ok. A tiny minority have done very well. Just like every other type of school in this country, private schools turn out an array of personality types that go on to the real world and have a range of experiences. Some of my friends who were privately educated are doing the same for their children and aren’t happy with what they get for the money. Some are happy with the education but their children are struggling. Some have chosen not to privately educate as they were unhappy with their experiences. Some don’t want to burden their children with the stigma. some don’t privately educate because of the afore mentioned very normal jobs.
like I said - diddly squat guarantee, so don’t kid yourself. Very few children become those oft toted alumni - most are really very average.

@QuebecBagnet because the teacher grades were still meant to be based on evidence. And if the children in private schools got a better education than in state during Covid (generalising, obviously), then they're likely to have produced more evidence of good grades.

It's also the case that private schools often had more resource available to assess that evidence, rather than spending less time on it. I have a friend in a senior role at a private school, and they sweated blood, swear and tears to assess evidence and try to ensure optimistic but fair grades (which is precisely what the government told them to do) - I mean endless, endless hours of work.

And just from this thread, there are plenty of private schools whose grades are higher this year than last, too.

(NB your anecdote about the pupil with the U - that was the government algorithm, which applied to all schools, not just state. Those kinds of anomalies are the reason they scrapped the algorithm at the last minute.)

That has nothing to do with teachers giving out the grades, but the rules that the government put in place.

If I had a class of 10, lets say in 2019 there were 2A*s, 6As and 2Bs.

In 2020 centres (not class teachers) had to say what the most likely grade a student would get was, that would probably be something like 3A*s 6As and a B.
Nothing to do with teachers, simply the question asked was different.

In 2021, the question asked, kind of of class teachers, but actually still of centres, was to produce evidence of the best grade that student could get.
Clearly that is going to be more even than the previous year, because most A grade students will produce some work of an A* standard.

Absolutely! The CAGs (2020) and the TAGs (2021) followed completely different processes. The TAG rules seemed to have been written to ensure very high grades; we spent a very long time going through them and couldn't quite believe it. It still took ages to compile all the required evidence.

Given that there are other factors that could explain the bigger decrease this year compared with state schools (eg more stable teaching during Covid, better online provision), I don't think you can possibly claim that the 'data shows that as a group private schools didn't act fair'.

But we are comparing the independent school results within their own sector between different years, not comparing the difference between private school and state school results so the method of provision has no bearing on this unless private schools were teaching their own students better during Covid than afterwards?

No, because the private school students are still competing against state students in terms of the overall share of grades, the grade boundaries etc. If the state school competition was stronger in 21/22 than in 20/21, then private schools are going to have done disproportionately worse this year. (Similarly, the restricted content is likely to have disproportionately helped state schools - as it was rightly designed to do - because private schools would probably have been better able to teach fuller content if they'd had to.)

Sorry to post at this stage. My children both went to the local fairly average comp but in a very leafy area of London. They did their sixth form at the Further Education /Sixth Form College. Both went to Cambridge as did a number of students from their year group.
I remember statistics showing that State School students at Cambridge do much better than privately educated students. State school students are generally more self reliant and independent learners

www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/news/state-school-pupils-do-better-at-university-cambridge-assessment-research-confirms/