School reports which give your kids GCSE grades or 'flightpaths' are bollocks

[noblegiraffe]

I've posted quite a lot about how reports which say 'your child is currently working at a 4+ in maths' or 'your child in Y7 is making good progress towards their GCSE target grade' are nonsense.

No one knows how your kid would perform in the new GCSEs because no one has had any results for them yet. This is especially nonsense for the subjects other than maths and English where students haven't even sat their mocks. Students from Y7 up have had GCSE target grades generated for them through a computer program that doesn't have any information about how anyone has actually performed on those GCSEs. These targets will be bobbins, and will be revised the instant any results roll in and so will change year on year as each new Y11 cohort sits the exams. If you've been told these targets by the school, the school is stupid to do so.

Teachers are forced to make up 'working at' numbers, and give a 3+ or a 4- to give an impression of accuracy.

If your kid is in top set Y7 then that's a good sign. If they're in bottom set that's a bad sign for a GCSE pass. But there's a long way to go and a lot can happen. That's as accurate as you're going to get.

There's an interesting twitter thread here where experienced headteachers are discussing exactly how nonsensical these reported grades are.

twitter.com/teacherhead/status/885923507858792457

Comments like 'GCSE grades extrapolated back to KS3 despite the fact we don't even know what they mean for year 11. Utter madness- completely meaningless'

And 'It's nonsense, but the shambles we find ourselves in nationally doesn't help.'

• just confirm that many teachers feel the same way about this illusion of science.

If you teach English you must know we are working in the dark and this is all pointless. As @noblegiraffe said.

If you have hopes for your child getting an 8 or 9 in English or Maths in Year 11, and their Year 9 result is a "3", they are well off-track and need some pretty serious help. Or you need to revise your expectations

That rather depends on how accurate the 3 is as well as how accurate the expectations are, doesn't it? Do you really know what a 3 in Y9 against the new curriculum assessment looks like? There's not even a direct equivalent to the old GCSE grades, and even if there was, the new GCSE tests skills differently to the old one. Is that kid a kid who would have been dragged down or boosted by their coursework result (boys v girls will be interesting here)? Are they going to discover a talent for memorising poetry that will have more of an effect than before? How exactly was the '3' decided? How much time and consideration was put into it? Probably not much. Certainly not as much as a parent might hope.

It seems that schools need to do two things:

1. Communicate to parents where their child falls in the national picture
2. Communicate whether that is acceptable for that child.

That's actually a massive ask. 1. Happens at KS2 and at GCSE. Anything in between is a fudge. 2. Pretty hard to say, except at extremes.

Noblegiraffe what we did for our 10s was predict what we would have expected th to get last year. After their exams - the SAM papers which were horrid - we looked at the groupings and they proved remarkably accurate. So if we had predicted an old A* then they were the kids that did best in the new exams. So 'ranking' wise the students appeared in roughly the order we would have expected. This makes me slightly more hopeful that for science at least next year the kids will get the result they expect - just with v low grade boundaries. Looking at English, well it's hideous !!

I just thank God I don't manage either of you.

what we did for our 10s was predict what we would have expected th to get last year

This is where teacher experience is invaluable, how would an NQT do on this task?
But it does come with a health warning as well. Ranking your kids on the new GCSE mock results is fine. Equating that with new GCSE grades with any type of certainty is not. Where do you draw the line for any particular grade? It's all fuzzy, especially when you take the impact of no coursework into account (when coursework was scrapped for maths in 2009, it really did affect girls and boys results differently).

bungled I have high expectations too, but taking out the extremes I still think it's impossible to be accurate.
From what I've heard about the English it's even harder to predict, because it isn't just about straightforward ability at the subject. Dd isn't gifted at it, but under the old system you could predict an a*. I honestly don't think she's genuine 9 material. However her ability to memorise and regurgitate information would at present make a 9 more likely for her than it would be for her friend who is genuinely gifted at the subject. And I don't expect a teacher to predict this will definitely still be the the case in 3yrs, or that both of them will still have the same ability to memorise by then.

There's quite a bit more to English than memorising and regurgitating. But I'm sure you know that and I'm being sensitive

Bungled I'm pretty pleased you don't line-manage me either. At least in a maths department I can expect my boss to have some understanding of data.

This Head gets it: schoolsweek.co.uk/we-need-to-ditch-progress-8/

Well what have you done and how @BungledUpInTwo because we certainly haven't had any guidance or support on how the hell to do this!

I am currently predicting GCSE grades for our Year 9s. Not because I think it's helpful, but because I HAVE to. Parents want it and government insist they have a prediction - based rather stupidly on what they did at KS2. Utterly ridiculous. But has to be done. You're right noblegiraffe, experience plays a huge part (which is why I'm doing the whole year group this time). I have one student who FFT has predicted a 9. She's a clever girl but she's also lost her mum this year and gone off the rails. Poor kid is now being predicted a 6. Quite frankly, if we can keep her in school it will be a success to me. But not to the powers that be. Anything less than a 9 and we will be deemed to have failed. I now give 2 predicted grades - the one that is mythically made from results they got at 10/11, and one set that teachers think is possible. Although with no guidance as to what the exam boards want it's all a bit bonkers.

I've done what all schools have done -- collaborated with colleagues, talked to other schools, read the information and made a best guess. In September we will have actual grade boundaries for this year's cohort, and we will adjust our own then.

My best guess isn't perfect, of course not. No-one can say with total accuracy where the boundary for a 5 or 6 will lie. But nor is my best guess "bollocks" or "nonsense". It creates a coherent pattern of assessment and achievement that falls in line with what, using my experience, I expect at GCSE.

How do I know that the Year 9 with a 3 won't become a Year 11 with a 9? Because I don't need an elaborate data system to tell me that. Because I understand the GCSE specification, my school's curriculum, the skills and the mark schemes and I can see where a child is falling behind the top in terms of aptitude and effort.

The implication above is that no teacher can possibly make any, even vague, predictions for any students. What rubbish.

I'm pretty much only dealing in 7,8 and 9. We have very little idea what a 9 will look like compared with an 8.
It is nonsense and bollocks to predict a GCSE grade for a year 7 with any certainty. They are people not units that operate in a linear fashion. One of my students had to travel to the US for cancer treatment for half of year 11. That obviously had an impact on his result but no one knew that would happen until the end of year 10.

Not saying there isn't bungled. My point is that the new criteria even just at the top end make it possible a child will gain or lose a grade based on how well they can remember texts, which imo isn't a true reflection of ability in language. Therefore how does a teacher accurately predict, especially when you can't pin point the child's ability?

How do I know that the Year 9 with a 3 won't become a Year 11 with a 9?

That's looking at extremes isn't it? Extremes are easy, but not useful examples, as they do not cover most students.

noblegiraffe you really will argue with anything won't you. At 12:54 you were saying "that rather depends", now you're saying "That's looking at extremes."

I work in schools data, and it's massively frustrating from our end too - trying to predict who will have the grades to enter the sixth form is a kludge and a headache. I feel so upset for the kids who have to deal with this.

One school in our city was apparently predicting mostly 6 and above for their maths, and our predictions had barely anyone over 6 at all - just different interpretations. (And different intakes but not a grammar area.)

Incidentally, I'm not averse to giving KS4 students a rough 9-1 GCSE grade, say end of Y10 onwards, it's necessary for future plans. Giving Y9 students a ballpark idea of what they might expect to achieve (not what they are currently achieving) is necessary for taking options. Giving Y7 students a single GCSE grade target, or KS3 students a 'working at GCSE grade' is entirely unnecessary and given the current situation is totally bizarre.

It means very little and can be disheartening. What's the point in telling a year 7 that they'd fail if they sat an exam now. They're not sitting the exam now are they.

Bungled It does depend and it's looking at extremes. I can discuss the example and say that it's not a good one, right?

What's the point in telling a year 7 that they'd fail if they sat an exam now. They're not sitting the exam now are they. But they haven't even covered most of the course - how do you examine a course that hasn't been taught?

Dd is in Year 10. Her school kept the old levels until the beginning of this year when they have moved to 9-1 (at least for year 10 anyway)

It's all still bunkum though. Dd was given predicted grades based on Cats. She exceeded her target level for music by the end of year 7. The report I've just had still gives her a target grade of Grade 6 but she's currently working at Grade 8 level (because they don't know boundaries her school have used a system whereby if they would have been A* in the old exams they will be 8 in the new etc)
In maths she got 72% over 3 papers (year 10 AQA mock) she had thought it was 80 but that was over just two of the papers. School have put that down as a Grade 6 (target Grade 7). I expect a different school might have given a different grade.
Her science grades given are worrying but I've no idea if it's accurate & it's affecting her choice of A levels.

You are all wrong because a very clever person completefuckingdickhead I work with says that flight paths are essential and accurate. And another very clever person anotherfuckingdickhead knows that 63% is going to be a 4.

It really is a load of bollocks

What exactly is a flightpath?

The school ds is due to move to in September has pathways but that seems to be just a way to describe whether a child chooses academic gcses's, ebacc subjects, a mixture of gcse & Btec or more vocational courses (& there is an element of choice in which pathway you take)

Here's a basic set of flight paths found on Google.

So it says where a student who got a particular grade at KS2 should be at each point in their secondary career in order to achieve a particular grade at GCSE. Students can then be marked as making 'below expected progress' 'making good progress' etc depending if they are pootling along their flight path, falling below or soaring above.

It sounds good, but it's just totally rubbish. Schools are using these in different ways: some are just reporting whether they think the kid is following the line and not reporting the target, some are reporting the target, some are asking teachers to give a current grade to match against the flight path, some are asking teachers to decide if the GCSE target grade is what the pupil will get in a few years time.

So for kids like my two who didn't do says would they just guess?