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.

It is that level of experience that is being used on a consultancy basis by some MATs and schools to start mapping out flightpaths

What level of experience? We don't have the results for the new GCSEs yet. A debate about how things may or may not pan out is hardly a good basis for an entirely new system which is apparently already implemented.

Last November Edexcel ran a mock GCSE for maths. Thousands of schools submitted their results, at a question level, and the results were analysed by the experienced analysts at Edexcel. And yet Edexcel, despite releasing the data, and the analysis, did not release grade boundaries for these exams. Do you know why? Because they said they would not be reliable.

Our school uses extracts from past (old style) GCSE papers and sample (new style) GCSE papers in assessments from KS3 onwards.

And? Using selected questions from old GCSE papers doesn't make it any more or less easy to give a grade to those papers. Grade boundaries are only relevant to total scores across a whole paper. I could give selected GCSE questions to my Y7s and they'd get 100% or 0%. What GCSE grade would that give them?

oddsocks ds is 12 and just finished year 7. The primary system of marking/grading was actually really damaging for ds as no one had expectations of him. Fingers crossed for your DTBs to figure it out and gain that bit of maturity in the next academic year and beyond. I fear ds will do his usual trick and just slide down the grades because he work shy and just work on excuses to justify it. Its an on going battle but at least the secondary school system is on the same page.

Noble we could argue all day about the detail, but going back to my original point, so long as the flight paths come with a health warning and are billed as a "work in progress" I don't think they should be dismissed as bollocks. As with all predictions, they will be refined in time, as more data becomes available.

As for the parents who you say are boasting about their DCs' predicted grades on Facebook, I would agree with you that they are jumping the gun.

pressure to succeed under the new regime meant schools were finding it "hard to make sure they put children's interests first and think children, children, children

This is not new. My mum had my sister removed from several GCSEs due to the amount of pressure the school put on her and the impact on her MH. This has been going on for years/decades, and I honestly doubt that whilst politics are involved in the running of schools that this will ever change.

generally don't you understand it doesn't matter if they are billed as a work in progress, they're fundamentally flawed from the start and will always have health warnings? Great big fat ones saying that they're an unreliable bunch of arse. More data will just be putting frosting on a turd.

Tom Sherrington has just posted a new blog, which is great because it totally agrees with what I've been saying

teacherhead.com/2017/07/16/towards-an-assessment-paradigm-shift/

It starts with "Confusing bell-curve ranking with absolute standards. A C grade or a Level 4 never were or are indications of absolute standards; they only make sense in reference to a cohort. It’s never been true that, say, ‘explaining how a motor works’ is Grade B or ‘solving simultaneous equations’ is Grade 8. If a student has a grade 5 on their report – we know nothing about what they know. The very worst examples of this are where schools use GCSE grades as a ladder – the horrible notion of ‘Working At’ grades that has now penetrated into KS3 in some schools. In most subjects there is no meaningful sense in which you are at Grade 3, then a 4, then a 5; or a D then a C then a B. Bell-curve markers do not work in that way..it’s a nonsense. (I’ve even seen examples of 3+ and 4- being used – as if they are definitely, definably distinct)."

And continues with "The illusion of ‘progress’ as something than can be measured via reference to bell-curve grades or data points in general. ‘Levels of progress’ was the worst example of this – with the absurd but pervasive misconception that a jump from a 3 to a 5 or a 4 to a 6 are broadly equal without any reference to the content of what is being learned. When we were forced to talk about students making ‘five sub-levels of progress’ I really thought we had lost our minds… it’s pure data idiocy. This has now gone (Gove’s greatest legacy in my view), but the very idea that ‘progress’ in learning has a measurable size, ludicrous as it is, is still widely held onto."

There's a lot more in the blog worth reading.

The idea that flightpaths are in someway valid because there are people out there working very hard at making them valid reminds me of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch where he devotes his life to training ravens to fly underwater.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=JhS35f015SQ

Have only partially read this interesting thread.
I have y9 boy whose progress reports this yr have said well below or below flightpath for some subjects.
We went in to see HoY as we were concerned and confused . Were told he needed to try harder ..that they would send out his predicted grades ..they haven't .
Ds is quite demoralised and losing confidence because of these reports..saying that he's just not clever and he's obviously on the wrong sodding flightpath and can he cancel the flight

Does he have travel insurance?

The individual subject teachers might be more use than the HoY. If nothing else they ought to be able to tel you exactly what skills/content he needs to work on to get from being below his flight path to on it. Or at least something more constructive than work harder.

I hate this sort of thing. I was a straight A student throughout high school. Never got a B or C in my high school life. I sat my CSEs being predicted A's across the board and got D's and E's in everything. I completely freaked out during the exams. The pressure to do well was overwhelming from all corners and I completely flunked the lot mostly in a blubbering snotty hyperventilating mess.

As far as I'm concerned it's great the school think my children have the potential to gain A's or 9's or whatever they decide to grade them with this week. But given education is ongoing and easily accessible past compulsory school age I'm not fussed if my children don't reach those targets or follow the set flightpaths etc at 16/18 years old. Theres plenty of time to resit or study more suitable subjects after high school.

I wish they would stop stressing children out. There is no other time in a persons life that they are put under so much pressure to achieve/gain something than the school years. Half of those exams wont even make a difference to the students life once they study A levels/Degree/Apprenticeship, that GCSE Drama/Re/Flower Arranging they were so stressed and worried about will have no purpose.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay lol no not insured ..
Thanks we have been emailed the subject teachers and have had some good advice ..lets see if he'll step up to the mark. He did say...'mum, I think I'll buy some GCSE revision guides " so he's talking the talk.....

noble, I think I love you a little bit after reading this. My current school is now working on "flightpaths" and using GCSE grades for KS3. Worse than that, in order to prove that children are making progress throughout the year we are using decimalised grades. I have absolutely no idea what will distinguish a grade 3 from a grade 4, so how am I supposed to say which kid is "working at" a grade 3.4 and which at a 3.5?

And the most recent idea - we should be putting these decimalised working at grades on every piece of homework. It is certainly creating the illusion of progress and keeps OFSTED happy, so nevermind if it doesn't actually help the child to make any progress.

Imagine if my time spent creating these (largely meaningless) grades could, instead, be spent on planning lessons which help children to build on previous knowledge and make genuine progress? Well, I may never be allowed to do that because if we can't measure the progress in terms of GCSE grades then clearly it didn't happen.

My DS is just finishing Y7. He came out of Y6 with over 110 in all Sats, but this has no bearing on the flight path info.

His report has him at a 3 or 4- for most subjects, which his teachers are saying is excellent and we should expect 7-9 in his GCSE. Which is bollocks at the moment as that isn't what the general flight path says.

My message to him, is work hard, put the effort in and question everything and we'll see what it all looks like in another 2-3 years time.

Oh dear god Dinah that's dreadful. Decimalised levels? Sublevels were bad enough and there were only 3 of those per level. Totally meaningless.
And grading homework? Apart from the fact that no one knows what the grades look like, we do know that putting a grade on a piece of work instantly destroys any feedback given as the kid only looks at the grade. So putting on a made-up useless grade isn't just neutral, it negatively impacts the effect of marking.

Do people not stop and think before implementing these sorts of systems? Is it because SLT are mainly PE and humanities teachers?

Then we've got people on this thread going 'oh yes, we've got the best experts working on this'. Well they're not experts are they? Good salespeople perhaps, but certainly not possessing any great insight into education or assessment.
The weird thing is that teachers, the ones who have to make the data up, the ones who go 'fuck it, 4.3, 5.5, 3.2 that'll do' know it's shit and yet the experts don't.

I'm wondering what Sean Harford thinks of decimalised grades.

Nothing good I suspect.

You have forgotten the sub levels of sub levels, noble. For those LAs where you needed to be able to show half a sub level of progress so each level ended up being divided into 6 rather than 3.

Decimalised is nuts though. Surely everybody should be able to look at that and know it's shit. Even the 'experts'.

I think Sean Harford is pretty sensible, but if the question was asked what do Ofsted think of it, then the response would be something like 'Ofsted do not require work to be graded in fine grades however we would expect teachers to mark according to the school marking policy'. It's how they've approached triple marking. They said they don't require it but haven't explicitly condemned it. They're possibly trying to avoid being prescriptive about teaching methods because that has caused them to come unstuck in the past.

I don't think I ever saw sublevels of sublevels. Actually maybe I did on here, some parent asking what they meant. Dark days.

It's a policy that only works if they can get the stuff about Ofsted myths more widely known.

Otherwise you end up with a vicious cycle of schools doing stuff they think Ofsted want to see, Ofsted saying they don't expect to see it but not actually pulling schools up on it as long as the school are following their own policy and then schools continuing as they were.

I think they are taking a slightly different line when it comes to tracking and assessment though. They do seem to be telling some schools that they don't like what they are doing.

Thank you to the teachers on this thread who have shared some insight into the grading madness. It's comforting scary as shit as a parent to remember that any prediction we might receive for our kids is never cast iron and we still need to support our kids teen monsters regardless.

Bell curves have been mentioned and I'm fairly ignorant about current marking schemes (despite having sat numerous exams in ny own time and shephereded 2 kids through the 11+). But aren't all these exams (new and old GCSEs, A Levels) based on a bell curve?

Or not, and that's what all the "pegging" to the old GCSE grades are about? Anyone able to clear up more confusion here...please?

Yes there have always been bell curves for grade boundaries, so no change there. But we used to have a pretty good idea where the boundaries would be as they never moved many marks. Next year we have no clue ! New exams with no trialling so no idea what constitutes each grade !
The pegging was agreed by the Government - cynically I believe as they could see the disaster that was going to happen ! So the same % of students that got an A or above will get a 7 or more and the same for a 5 and an old C. So last year for an A* in maths you needed about 85%. I have a sneaky feeling an 8 is going to be much much lower than that this year. But fingers crossed the kids will get the results they deserve - just with much lower grades required
Obviously the A level take up is going to be interesting as kids now feel they are rubbish at maths (& other subjects) and won't opt for it.

Rather depressingly, noble, shortly after the introduction of decimalised grades on every homework we had an inset session on marking. It was useful, informative and evidence based. Immediately afterwards a member of slt stood up and said 'that is great, but we must remember we need to play the ofsted game'.

But I work in a shit (slt wise) school. Simply put, effort grades alone are a reason to quit. If a child is not exactly on target in year 9 there could be a million reasons why. But according to my slt I'm not allowed to give the top effort grades to a student why isn't meeting her target (though she has been off school for half the year due to medical issues and constantly emailing in work). And I'm not allowed to give bottom effort grades to a student who is on target because is simply isn't possible to be on target and disruptive, right?!

At this stage I would welcome a version of ofsted which was prescriptive but evidence based. Far better than the 'do what the fuck you want as long as all the teachers are doing it' we have now.

Sorry off topic I know but it's interesting Dinah that there's a policy on effort grades - they always seem so completely random on my dc's reports, we've taken to ignoring them as the dcs get so outraged that they've busted a gut, handed in every piece of homework, come to class on time, with all the equipment, engaged in class discussion etc but in some subjects they only get a good when they think they deserve an excellent....there's maybe a touch of perfectionism creeping in there but the effort grading doesn't really explain what they need to improve upon. Even a random comment on ds's report from the HOY reminding him to check the new Homework app to keep himself more organised - he has handed in every single homework on time and to a good quality - ds is not happy at the implied sloppiness!

I think this teacher puts it pretty effectively...

Horrible :( My poor lad just finished year 7 and his targets were 5's for a few subjects..Of course he has in the 4's for them and now thinks he has failed.

But do many/any parents actually believe the letters or numbers attributed to their children in year 7 (8, 9 or even 10) are GCSE result predictions, anyway? I always just assumed they were a teacher's artistic interpretation of how well they thought my child was doing compared to other children in that year group or of that age whom they personally had taught, as they couldn't realistically compare them to children they had no experience of. Given that performance in class and homework is not the same thing as performance in a timed, national test, it would not cross my mind to think it was a genuine prediction of a GCSE result, particularly if the GCSE syllabus was not even being taught, yet. Even if I was told the assessment was a 1-9 graded assessment like the GCSE grading system, with 9 being the best any child could get and 1 the worst, I wouldn't think it was an accurate school prediction of my child's future test results.

If the numbers are actually just complete bullshit, not even based on how my children are actually perceived to be doing by the teacher, but massaged to get them as close as possible to where the computer says they should be, so that the teacher gets their performance related 1% payrise and Ofsted says it is happy, then that is a huge shame, as it is genuinely pointless on all levels (excuse the pun) to all people.