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?

Well, yeah, genuinely 'bespoke' cheating is the one thing you can't do much about!

Although I've had a couple of 'ok, so talk me through your excellent essay - can you expand on this interesting idea? Oh you can't? Go away & come back with another ahem, draft, ok?' conversations & sent kids off squirming.

Plus our students all go to the same pool of 'private tutors' . One mad old bat in particular has a very recognisable style... I've quietly told several kids '... You might do better not to let Miss Ethel be quite so helpful, she's not necessarily up to date on new specification qualifications...'

This invariably generates a furious email from 'Ethel', but since she obviously can't quite come out & admit she's written the damn thing herself (& without actually looking at the assessment objectives), she then sulks off for a bit.

Roll on all terminal exams. To the extent that User14 has any vestige of a point, CW is where that point lurks.

Just to clarify:

My post yesterday evening was NOT my words, that was a list of quotes from other teachers from a thread on the Times Educational Website, entitled "Is there room in teaching for an honest man?" answer 4:1 straight NO - there are many more threads on cheating, a and many more quotes on the website.

I am not "moving my goal posts" or any such thing. The entire system is rife with fraud and cheating right across the board.

1. There is massive cheating in SATS. Absolutly MASSIVE

1. Of course secondary schools game their SATS baseline. It is laughably easy. Anyone who thinks school records follow students round from school to school with any level of certainty or reliability is deluded. I sometimes have had entire classes of KS4 students who didn't attend primary school or take SATS. It is a doddle to choose them some results. It's equally easy to lose results you don't like, you just say it is a new child and they don't have any results. No body checks.

1. Course work is cheated hugely. I know of ONE school which doesn't cheat in controlled assessments. Schools can't hand in identical controlled assessments, so commonly the teacher will put 5 slightly differently worded answers on the board, then go round the class saying pupil A - copy down answer 1, pupil B, - copy down answer 2, etc. Alter the order you call out the pupils in each question, and no two controlled assessments are the same.

1. BTEC portfolios are commonly lies from beginning to end, again I only know ONE school which conducts BTEC fairly and honestly ( not the same as the only school i know which doesn't cheat on controlled assessments - in fact the school which does BTEC fairly actually DICTATES controlled assessments to children)

1. Cheating in final exams is an every day occurrence, taking phones in and logging on to the internet to look up answers is normal. The old fashioned taking notes in happens a lot, cheating by looking and copying each other, if they are too close together I have also seen, and of course, passing your uniform on to your mate who is taking A levels in the subject works very well indeed, when all the invigilators are external, and no one knows your face.

Support staff, scribes, readers, etc also cheat outrageously sometimes too.

6. Whistle blowing is common but has no effect, the whole system is corrupt beyond what can be rectified by whistle blowers. There are a few times when cheating is punished, but it is far more likely to be the whistle blower that suffers.

I really don't see how I can be any clearer.

2, 3 and 5 are nonsense.
2) secondary schools do not control the KS2 data and those without are not used in the Progress 8 data (how often do you have to be told this)
3) I have never worked in a school that did coursework this way. If nothing else it would be bloody dull. Admittedly I have only worked in 4 schools but they covered a fair range.
5) Phones do NOT make it in to our exam hall. If they did the said student would be disqualified. I'm not entirely sure how you think they could access the Internet and not be spotted by our highly professional invigilators who care about standards.
Clearly things are very different where you work.
I can't speak for BTEC we don't do them.
A post such as the one you quote from is naturally going to attract people who agree with it. I for one have never gone on a TES discussion board.
I have already told you about my experience whistleblowing which was a win win all round.
This is quite different from when I disagree with people on these boards normally. I frequently lock horns with people over selective education and we have managed to remain civil. The difference? Your outdated information amongst other things. Let me say again, secondary schools do not control KS2 data. It isn't our data to game!

So if I have a WHOLE CLASS who I KNOW did not attend primary school, where do you think their SATS data comes from?

If I KNOW a student DID attend primary school, and do well there, where do you think their SATS data disappears to?

There is so much uncertainty and confusion about which child came from which primary school and what records are theirs that I have even known teachers have to go to court to identify students, who need to prove residency, but whose primary school records have been totally lost, SATS results included.

Do you think students are micro chipped or something?

There is no way to prove whose SATS results are whose. We frequently have multiple students with the same name, apart from anything else, and just choose the results we want. School records simply don't move smoothly around following the child, Not when you have thousands upon thousands churning around in the system, arriving, leaving, changing, constantly, many with the same name, and many of whom change their names during their school career as well.

How could it POSSIBLY happen that the right SATS results unfailingly arrive at the right secondry school, and how could it NOT be possible for an awful lot of fixing and fiddling to be going into the shunting round of the data.

I've seen it many times.

I'm glad your invigilators are highly professional. How many do you have? We must have around 40-45 ( I am guessing) 40-45 casual workers for part tie temporary work, PER SCHOOL, about 20 state secondary schools in the borough, say, 750 invigilators required, some schools are smaller than ours... 750 people to find in one borough, not including private schools.... there are NOT 750 highly professional invigilators sitting round twiddling their thumbs waiting for exam season. They are mostly unemployed teens, or students earning a bit of beer money. Care, they do not.

You are not in a position to say any of it is nonsense. you are in a position to say you haven't noticed any of it in your school, although I would guess that must take determination and effort. Phones in exam rooms are extremely common. Coursework cheating is practically universal, I only know one school that doesn't. Who cares how dull it is? The only concern is the grades.

We frequently have multiple students with the same name

And date of birth? And UPN?
Have you heard of the National Pupil Database?

it doesn't work. students are not followed and tracked, they are simply not.

people are not micro chipped like cats, you can't prove that two names belong to the same pupil, or that one name isn't two people

Our local school cheated on controlled assessment for History GCSE the year my daughter did them (2 years ago) by simply getting the children to draft and redraft, with the teacher in some cases writing in fairly lengthy changes for her to copy. Geography allowed the work to be taken home, even though it was supposed to all be done in school. MFL CAs were corrected and re-corrected by the teacher.

The Guardian articles below talk about this issue. A fair number of teachers commenting below the article said their school also cheats, but a fair number said theirs didn't. So, clearly this is an issue in some schools, though there isn't really any way of telling how widespread it is.

www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/jun/27/secret-teacher-we-help-pupils-to-but-how-long-before-its-exposed

www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/jan/28/secret-teacher-school-teaching-students-plagiarise

My understanding is that it works like this (happy to be corrected by a genuine school data person or DfE employee, though):

The DfE has the SATs results of each child, against a pupil number.

They then get the GCSE results, against the pupil number.

They match the two (or there is no match because there are no SATs results), and thus calculate Progress8.

Are you saying that the schools you have worked in don't even have any record of which pupils they have in them??

Of course, internal data sometimes gets delayed / shuffled - for a new child I sometimes get a full set of reports, and sometimes don't get any data at all. However, the data still exists, held OUTSIDE the school(s) in question, and can be linked to GCSE / other post 16 qualifications.

user,

Your school may be incapable of linking a UPN, date of birth, and pupil name to sets of results.

However that really doesn't mean that an external body holding all that information can't.

like I said, I have had whole classes that have primary SATS data, in spite of never having attended primary school

Just to say again - new GCSEs have minimal, if any, coursework. So the historical examples given by user are simply being 'managed out' of the system.

This is a good thing.

What I find interesting is that although there are a few examples of 'falls from grace' - that school in Telford that managed to get itself to the top of league tables by entering lots of GCSE equivalent courses - as a general rule the move to terminal exams has not been accompanied by widespread changes in the relative ranking of schools. the great ones with great results are still great schools with great results. the less good ones with poor results still get poor results. So if cheating IS going on, it is essentially a zero sum game - or just perhaps isn't as widespread as suggested...

user,

Internal data sheets? Or actual external data from the DfE?

I know that schools can assign a 'nominal baseline' for internal use, to enable tracking and target setting. That is normal, and in itself not remotely suspicious.

What doesn't happen is the use of that data for external accountability such as Progress8.

Can you swear that the data you have seen is used for the calculation of externally-calculated Progress8?

yes

"like I said, I have had whole classes that have primary SATS data, in spite of never having attended primary school"

That sounds very, very, very unusual. What kind of education do the children in your have before they arrive to you then?

So the historical examples given by user are simply being 'managed out' of the system.

these are not historical examples, these are this summer's current qualifications, and doubtless next summer's too.

I have had children in my class with no KS1 SATs data, having transferred from a private school.

In our internal tracking system, they are given a 'nominal' KS1 result to enable the tracking process to work well.

I know that that result isn't 'real'. So does the DfE. Reading the data output at face value, you might think that the school has 'assigned' a KS1 result and is 'cheating' - but everyone concerned understands that it has no validity for external accountability purposes.

its not unheard of in London, OddBoots, unusual for it to be the whole class, but it does happen. Particularly lower achieving classes, if they are set.

It is irrelevant if you ever saw the data. The data isn't manipulated by you. It is done by the DfE. And no, students without KS2 data just aren't used for this purpose.
And FYI, we use mainly retired people for our invigilators. The chief invigilator is an old head of department within the school. If your school is employing substandard invigilators I would expect the exams officer to deal with that.
Phones are handed in on the way to exams. This is the same for all exams. We used to trust them for internals to have them in their bags but two students were caught. They failed that subject and now all phones have to be handed in. The boys are well aware of what would happen if they're caught and know it isn't worth the risk. But then when the teachers take assessment seriously, they do too.
We still do A Level coursework. And work to the rules. One draft then final version. End of. Seems to work exceptionally well for us.

So year 12 (last year's Year 11), included in Progress8 coverage but having no SATs results? Are you sure? What is the percentage coverage for your school's Progress8 value (it's harder to find in the current website than it used to be - but it is in there somewhere)?

The DfE doesn't collect KS2 SATs exam data from schools (it collects Teacher Assessment data from primaries). Whatever made-up SATs data user has seen on SIMs doesn't leave the school.

No you can't user. You don't supply the progress 8 data. DfE does. And yes pupils are tracked. By the DfE. And yes their system is very very robust and capable of doing so - as effective as micro-chipping them. (It's actually very easy.... Whether you or any other parent is comfortable with the amount of data DfE has on your child is another thread of course.)

And as I mentioned upthread my school is not in our usual high position on Progress or Attainment 8 as we did IGCSE for both English courses and they didn't count (and the year weren't our best cohort by quite a long way). We had deliberately switched to IGCSE in the first place as it doesn't have coursework. We're more concerned with preparing them for A Level and then for University than with 'gaming' the system. Our high league table position is a side effect of a LOT of hard work from naturally bright students and supportive teachers.

And yes their system is very very robust and capable of doing so - as effective as micro-chipping them. you may be under that illusion, but it simply isn't