Is this school govenor's take on Progress 8 scores correct?

[PossumInAPearTree]

Dds school recently had a shocking Ofsted and got put in special measures. Bottom 10% of schools nationwide for progress and results according to the report.

Head has made it clear in emails home and to kids in assembly they disagree with the report, as has the governor.

Governor says the reason for the poor Progress 8 score is because the school has standards and won't pull tricks other schools do such as putting nAtive English speakers in for an English as a Foreign Language qualification purely so the kids get points/ a qualification.

Surely if this is what other schools are doing Ofsted would pick up on this?

My children have moved & are moving into secondary schools from an independent school that did not do SATS.

I'm actually quite sad about this in my dd's case as I feel she was underachieving when she first started Year 7 & her progress data will not be included in her schools Progress 8 score so will not reflect how they have helped her to improve.

The governor is trying to put a positive spin on it. While there is likely to be a small element of truth in his/her position, it's fairly insignificant in comparison with the much larger problem of the school simply not being effective. An effective school can get decent Progress 8 scores without 'gaming'.

If the school is put in special measures most likely the majority of the governors will be replaced - and I think that the governors' current argument shows why. Instead they will bring in experienced, skilled governors who will look closely at the school and look to make a real positive change to allow the pupils to reach their potential, rather than just whinging about perceived injustices.

User's experience does not chime with any of mine.
The secondary I know best has only this year (current Y9s going into Y10 in September) re-arrange its option blocks to facilitate ebacc. They're far more interested in pupils being able to take subjects they love and are good at than playing the system.
Funnily they think pupils perform best when they've chosen subjects of their own volition!

I'm sure there are some schools that do play the stats and cheat. Not enough to explain why the school is in the bottom 10% though.

Bit IME it is never a good sign when the Head and the governing body blame a poor Ofsted on Ofsted themselves or other schools. It usually goes quite a long way towards explaining the grade they got.

Many schools offer options with the stats in mind - forcing kids to take a language for example. I remember a school a few years back doing this by blocking French against BTEC Health and Social Care/Travel and Tourism so the bright kids had to take French or something that many parents would see as an unacceptable option. Now they do it by 'Pathways' or the 'Ebacc route' and only offer the bright kids the Ebacc subjects.

However, this is what the government want, it's seen as a good thing for as many students as possible to take a range of academic subjects. By 'gaming' the league tables, the schools are actually offering these kids a better quality education than what used to happen when bright kids were put in for vocational qualifications that counted as 4 GCSEs but wouldn't help them with their A-level choices.

Cheating on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. User talks about her school entering pupils for multiple English qualifications. I don't know about English, but I do know about maths. It's supposed to be impossible to enter a student for Foundation and Higher maths. You can't do it through the exam board and as maths exams are mostly sat on the same day across the exam boards, you shouldn't be able to do OCR Foundation and Edexcel Higher. However, exam centres can vary the times of exams where there is a clash, so technically, you can enter a kid for OCR Foundation, Edexcel higher, have the kids sit two papers in the same day but vary the start time due to the 'clash'. The exam boards won't know because they don't compare entries. This is also malpractice, it's not allowed.

A blogger made a FOI to Ofqual to get the stats on schools which do this. 172 centres out of 5314 did, however this only represented 423 candidates or 0.062% of the total entries.

So this sort of blatant cheating does occasionally happen, but only in an incredibly small minority of cases.

justmaths.co.uk/2017/04/26/conditions-of-entry/

@noblegiraffe English no longer has tiered papers and IGCSE doesn't count for the league tables so god knows how such gaming would even be possible. I expect the English results to be quite low this year as all students will have to deal with an unseen piece of 19th century literature. Some of my students have found this hard. So I'm not sure how those working at the 1-5 level are even going to access that part of the paper.

I would say the opposite is more likely to be true, in that they've been gaming the figures in the past and come unstuck because the progress 8 is much harder to game.

My local school has been gaming the system for years so the headline figures look much better. Eg getting their a-c pass rate mainly through c grades or equivalents, pushing courses based on ease of scraping a pass, quantity not quality for everyone to boost the figures, 5 passes more likely to be a btech and catering than maths and English, crap support so the Sen figures come from milder issues that don't impact pass numbers etc but still allow Sen % to be used as an excuse. Progress 8 is now showing all that up because they can't game it as easily. And I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up in sm next inspection.

Charitably I'm assuming that user was talking about previous years when the league table qualification list wasn't so strict.

I don't understand how a school could make up KS2 scores for kids that don't have them - don't the DfE work from their own set of results?

Yes I do have concerns that either the SLT or the governors are opening their eyes to where the problems are.

Ofsted report came out a few months ago (nearly three months after the inspection) and there's been no change in SLT or governors so I don't think that's going to happen.

The primary didn't artificially inflate his results user. Sorry if I made it seem that way. He had a reader, scribe and extra time due to his needs but first secondary withdrew this because he got level 4 in sats. They then predicted him 6's for his GCSEs and when they realised the amount of support he'd need to get him there they decided to bully us out instead.
Current school had good results but it's a different area and more pupils and they support those with send. Have to say they don't hark on about their results as much as the old school! In fact I've realised since ds left just how much they focused on it!

I am going to answer the original post as someone who would be considered to be an "expert" in school governance. Quite frankly OP this is a school that deserves to be in the situation it is in and Ofsted have made the right call in putting it into special measures. There is no question to me that the head teacher and the governor you quote are living in some parallel universe, just not accepting what Ofsted have said about the school. I can only hope that somebody outside of the school comes to their senses and does what is required, sacks the governing body so that an interim executive board takes over - I am currently doing two, so I do know what I am talking about. If an IEB does take over then the first question they will be asking themselves is whether the head teacher is capable of turning the school around. From your post, the answer is no and so they will have to be dismissed as well, unless all this is just talk to make them look better.
Bottom line is that progress 8 is now the measure that is most important and it is much more difficult to game the system with Progress 8 because it is based across all schools nationally.
As for any posters that say their school cheats (as opposed to just trying to get the best possible results by legal means) then shame on you for not reporting the cheating. How does that sit with your professional responsibilities and more importantly how does it make all the staff in the vast majority of schools in the UK look to the general public? You are denigrating all those staff that every day go over and above what they need to do for the sake of their pupils.

A school in SM is probably much worse than poor statistics. Usually it will be the majority of categories at a 4 and that will mean it is poorly led, managed and that there is poor teaching. All of this will back up the lack of progress. Also inspectors have a lot of detailed info from the school for all years! Not just their y11s. They look at how teachers assess progress, accuracy, quality of teaching and learning, the curriculum and much more.

It is likely the SLT, Governors and MAT(?) have burried their collective heads in the sand - for years. I would bet they have not had good enough data to even know where the problems lie, let alone do anything about them.

Lack of action would worry me. Is this school already an academy?

School is already an academy. Apparantly they've had an action plan approved though the letter didn't detail the action plan.

Ofsted report was level 4 in everything I think.

It looks like the school is staying with its sponsor then. If there is no progress though, I would expect further action if Ofsted come back and there has been no improvement.

I have not checked the rules for academies, but in a state school you can ask for documents which are considered by the Governing Bidy that are not confidential. A school can share headlines with parents to keep them up to date with what they intend to address and how they will do it - although Ofsted will have spelt this out in their report. You need to keep your eyes peeled for the next Ofsted visit. I would worry that the SLT and Governors are not up to it. Is the school in a multi academy trust or was it a stand alone converter? What expertise and advice did they buy in? It does not appear they are very well led or advised.

they are not very well led and advised.....

survey in the Times ES this week: more than 7% of primary teachers freely admit to cheating the SATS of their own free will, a further 10+% say they were coerced. So basically if you have 5 members of staff involved in SATS classes, including TAs, SMT etc, one of them admits to teaching. The Times itself says that it is unlikely that most cheats are going to be admitting it, and the figure has been put at more likely to be 3 in 5, including those who won't admit it, and those who don't actually consider it cheating.

User, I think the thread is about GCSEs?

SATs cheating, if it takes place, would REDUCE progress8, not increase it as you suggest..

This thread has individuals on it denying SATS can be cheated but they clearly are being, thoroughly so.

I know GCSEs are being cheated routinely. That's not even a question.

I quote admission:

As for any posters that say their school cheats (as opposed to just trying to get the best possible results by legal means) then shame on you for not reporting the cheating. How does that sit with your professional responsibilities?

I am ashamed to be part of the same profession as you, if you are what you claim to be.

what difference does reporting make? None what so ever. I've been there, done that, and sat back and watched whilst other people do. The whole system is totally corrupt.

Wtf! Ds1 school is consistently in the top 20 schools. My other dc are in a school which is rated good (their choice). Both schools have dedicated teachers who care about the dc and want the best for them, that includes teaching them not to cheat.

User should be ashamed of themselves, you bring your profession into disrepute by your disgusting attitude. You should understand the rules inside and out and ensure you abide by them. Anytime they are broken should be reported.

I realise engaging here is probably pointless but you've missed the point about SATs

People were denying that a secondary could cheat SATs results by lowering the results their yr 7s came in with in order to improve their progress 8 score. That CANNOT happen. Even if the school decided that the results were too high and they were going to lower them, the government would still be calculating progress scores on the actual results.

Primary schools, on the other hand can cheat SATs in order to improve their results. But that disadvantages secondaries and as a PP said is likely to decrease a secondary school's progress 8 scores.

Still off to be a 'Head of Sixth Form', User14? So claiming over sight of A levels or IB, right?

I don't have enough knowledge of the system to say whether fraudulent GCSE results are easily obtained. However I know which posters I believe on the subject.

It also doesn't fit with what I do know. The dodgiest school I know personally, which fiddles everything possible and outright lies/ ignores policy & law whenever it thinks it can get away with it clearly isn't cheating on exams from it's results. And top independents put a lot of time and money into obtaining every single mark for their top results. Nobody would really notice a few more a* from cohorts already selected on ability, and yet they don't seem to be abandoning teaching for cheating either.

Of course it's possible to be gaming the system and also be a competent school. An "outstanding" academy school near us with a very academically mixed intake used to be pushing its high achievers through an average of 17 (seventeen!) GCSE equivalents. Now clearly most people would consider that inappropriate gaming of the system. But now the iffy BTech's have been stripped out they seem to be continuing to thrive under Progress 8 (95th percentile) and as far as I can tell they're a genuinely good school - they were just also gaming the system.