Two state secondaries, similar area, similar cohort - how come one year 8 top set maths class got 50% level 8's and the other got none?

[MyballsareSandy]

Title says it all really. I don't understand. Do different schools mark these end of year exams in a different way?

in what test?

Just end of year exams for maths - year 8.

Er...I have no idea. Perhaps one teacher was feeling more benevolent? Maybe one group isn't being taught very well? Maybe one group has 15 kids in it who are better at maths than all the others?

Internal exams : entirely up to them what they do with them.
Unless you have seen both the papers and the predicted grades for the kids you cannot compare

It just seems such a startling difference, so made me ponder.

different exams!!
Levels are a pile of shit, so subjective, so easy to 'teach to'. Parents have been hoodwinked them IMO

Maybe one school used a level 5 to 7 paper and the other a level 6 to 8 paper. Unless you know the papers were identical you can't really assume the results should be the same!

How do you know they are similar cohorts and how do you know what results each class got?

I have 1 DD at a comp and the other has just left a super selective. Many level 8's in maths and English in year 7 at the comp whereas some year 9 students at the super selective did not achieve those level at the end of KS3.

In my opinion the levelling is applied differently in each school and is fairly meaningless.

I'm assuming similar cohorts as they are in the same area and the primary schools that feed into both schools have similar levels in year 6. If anything the school that has no level 8s has a higher intake of kids entering year 7 on level 6 SATs.

I know this because my DDs are in one school and a teacher friend's DDs are in the other.

You're talking about two classes of approx 30 Kids in each. All else being equal, that's the difference between one excellent teacher and one average/poor teacher. I'm speaking as a secondary teacher. I've seen similar results before. As I said, all else being equal.

As a maths teacher the simple answer is that they are not standardised tests. Schools can do what they want. In my school the top sets sat a 5-7 optional test. I know however that several of the pupils would of picked up a level 8 if they had done the 6-8 paper.

Some schools spend time broadening and deepening the L7 knowledge before racing ahead into L 8 material - even with top achieveing students. Playing the long game, with students they know will get top marks anyway.

I think I prefer that approach.

The other school might not have given their top set a 6-8 paper.

I also have a pretty dim view of schools that simply race through the levels in maths (backed in this view by the Advisory Committee on Maths Education, btw) so I'm not convinced that getting level 8 in Y8 is necessarily a good thing anyway.

One school is obsessed with levels at all costs and the other takes a broader view of education and realises they will get there in the end?

And the results-obsessed school also attracts parents who are results-obsessed, so it becomes self-fulfilling.

Or one maths teacher is better than the other. Very hard to tell without being a fly on the wall.

Are you absolutely sure you have the facts? If my year 8 said either everybody or nobody got a particular level, I would expect it to mean "me and the group I work with " got or didn't get.

The quality of the teaching really matters. Both cohorts cannot have exactly equivalent teachers.

Not just the quality of the teaching, but what and how they are being taught, which comes down to the philosophy of each particular maths department.

My department goes for quality not quantity, so there would be few if any level 8s in Y8 simply because they aren't taught level 8 stuff. We use the time for investigations and enrichment instead. You can't answer a question on trigonometry (level 8) if you haven't been taught trigonometry yet. We are trying to produce mathematicians, not simply kids who can get the highest levels on SATs tests. Our GCSE results are excellent so it doesn't do them any harm.

DS is at a super-selective and he says none of the boys in Yr 8 (even the maths genius!) get Level 8s in Maths whereas curiously lots of his friends at the comps (who didn't pass the 11+ exams) seem to be routinely getting levels way above their grammar school peers. His take on it is that the comp. ones are inflated! Not entirely sure I disagree with his view!

I left state primary school significantly behind DD who has just left hers and we had further to go to arrive at a decent maths O-level at the state comp (I then went way past that). I genuinely don't see anything much in the current KS3 curriculum that she hasn't been taught at school or would take that long to absorb. All by herself if you threw a textbook at her. Something strange has happened between my time and now and I struggle to see why L8 in Y8 should be that rare or at the expense of anything much.

-- "We are trying to produce mathematicians"

I want DD's upstream secondary to preserve a natural mathematician and in a more perfect world she'd get someone like the person who posted this in a comment on a blog article on KS2 L6 maths:

As well as being a secondary Maths teacher I am a Primary School Governor and therefore I get into quite a few Primary maths lessons on my visits. It’s really opened my eyes to see Primary school students comfortably doing work that is often seen in Year 7 curricula in secondary schools. This is not some sort of “year 6 crunch for the test” but in mainstream year 4 and year 5 lessons sometimes. I think many secondary maths teachers could do with spending a few days in Primary to see what really goes on on a day to day basis

I know a different secondary maths teacher, experienced and rather clever, who claims the top 10% of national ability could likely polish off current higher GCSE maths at 14.

"His take on it is that the comp. ones are inflated! Not entirely sure I disagree with his view!" I do hope you don 't encourage this sort of thinking?

polish off current higher GCSE maths at 14

Of course they could. Current maths GCSE is a bit of a joke for able students tbh.

But there is a big difference between learning mathematics and studying for maths GCSE. Maths GCSE is a narrow and rather impoverished subset of mathematics and I feel sorry for bright kids who only ever do work that counts towards it. And let's face it, if they do maths GCSE at 14, then what? You could easily end up with bright maths students who have finished secondary school maths well before they finish secondary school and thus are disadvantaged when it comes to wanting to study it at Uni.

Well you might assume similar intake, but you may be wrong.

Dd1's at a comprehensive. They split the year into half for setting in year 8, 6 forms in each and set the maths in each half. It's random forms so no setting over the split.
As it happens this year the same maths teacher is taking bth top sets, I don't know if that's usual, or has just happened that way.

Dd1's top set has about 1/3-1/2 level 8 and beyond pupils (some of them did last year's GCSE papers and got high Bs), the other top set had one level 8. She'd have been half way down in the other top set.

In maths I doubt it's to do with marking, as it's much more absolute. In English and such like it's much more subjective.
What has happened in dd1's set is that there is a group of 4 of them that really get into the maths and are asking not just for more to do, but harder things to do. It's not just moved them on, but also the rest of the set, who see this as something they want to try too. So they have done harder work because they have finished what has been set and asked for harder stuff, the other class takes much longer to get a concept and then generally take longer to do the work too.

In the same way, I remember the year below me at secondary was considered to be realtively poor at maths compared to us. One of my friend's parents was really upset that she didn't get into the top set, and when asked why they said she'd have been in the top set usually but our year was generally mathematical and had a lot of very good mathematicians. This was clear when GCSE/A-level results came out.

@noblegiraffe, when I run the universe the brighter children travel directly through the core KS3 work to give them a foundation to go to more interesting off-piste places afterwards.

Similarly for filling that interesting void after 'finishing secondary maths' early: I'd have doing STEP and the like so they have at least one advantage to match the posh kids.

@DeWee, "She'd have been half way down in the other top set."

But if she were in that set she might have been infected by the enthusiasm and be higher up.

The decision to have two parallel top sets is interesting and for me, a bit counter-intuitive.