Ofsted announce school report grades are bollocks and to be ignored

[noblegiraffe]

Confirming what I’ve been banging on about for ages, Ofsted have announced that school internal tracking data - the sort of ‘working at’ grades that appear on reports to parents - will be ignored in school inspections because it’s made-up nonsense.

“Too often a vast amount of teachers' time is absorbed into recording, collecting and analysing excessive progress and attainment data within schools. And that diverts their time away from what they came into the profession to do. which is be educators.

“And, in fact, with much of that internal progress and attainment data, they and we can’t be sure that it is valid and reliable information.”

www.tes.com/news/ofsted-inspections-wont-examine-internal-school-data

Maybe, just maybe, if Ofsted are no longer interested in seeing it, teachers won’t have to make it up any more?

Of course noble, Lehain is a Cambridge educated mathematician... the new head at his old school has pretty much got rid of the data systems they ahd!

Noble
We know that progress can’t be measured and quantified. So what can we report to parents?

• attendance at every lesson - less an issue in primary but a MASSIVE predictor at secondary ... it would have made my school deal with the issues
• handing in of every piece of assessed work on time (limiting that to one per subject per week to keep teachers sane)
• ratio of good to bad behaviour marks (to measure low level disruption)
• actual grades from every piece of marked work

so the stuff that used to be done back in the stone age, but cross checked between subjects and year groups using databases.

All that FFT stuff had such wide standard deviations it was bollocks and I was the governor in charge of the working group

one per subject per week would not keep me sane! It would drive me insane! Do you know how much marking that is in secondary English!!?

As an ex HOY, and a teacher of many years, most parents seem most interested in behaviour and attitude. They essentially understand this is closely correlated to progress.

Piggy
Do you know how much marking that is in secondary English!!?
Fair point. Well made.
Any yes, attendance and behaviour is the better marker.

At Symonds, alerts to parents were automatic if attendance dropped (and it was per lesson not per day)
but grading updates were only termly
It is an incredibly successful college that seems to get data right
and parents only go to meet teachers if there is a problem
( a perfect score is to never be called in over the two years )

Our grading updates to parents are termly, to be honest. It's what thse grade declarations are based on that needs interrogation. I'll be interested to see how Ofsted approaches this.

The most revolutionary school leaders require only annual 'data drops'.

The problem with only reporting effort and behaviour is parents being lulled into a false sense of security regarding outcomes - see my post about the Y7 whose parents had no idea she was doing really badly relative to the cohort.

I think as a maths teacher I would like details about end of year exam scores in some sort of box and whisker format.
But internal exams and tests are highly flawed when comparing data between classes. One teacher could have done a revision lesson which was basically the test with different numbers, where the teacher next door just set the homework ‘to revise’. Kids in the first class will do better on the test even if they’d been taught identically well all year.

But internal exams and tests are highly flawed when comparing data between classes.
Absolutely.
In an AS mock (with over 800 kids taking it at the college) one teacher was off sick so their class took it a week later - and funnily did amazingly as everybody else had talked about it ... luckily the data moderation sorted the predictions.

THe obsession with data is a distraction when what should be measured is attendance and engagement
and then allow teachers the discretion to give pointers to individual pupils

I want to know attitude/behaviour as that is what my DD can control herself.

But I absolutely want an idea how my DD is doing and whether I need to be providing additional support. To know that maths is OK but English is an issue, helps me know where to focus additional attention. To know science is fine but geography is dodgy.

Then come y10 I want to know what sort of options we should be considering for post GCSE - A levels, or BTEC, or a level 2 course. And if A levels, what subjects. Enjoyment doesn't always correlate with success.

The bottom line is, I want the teacher's best guess as to how DD is doing. I don't want them to be constrained by having to calculate something from a test score, or having to attempt to finely grade. But the teacher should be the expert.

The problem with teacher as expert is that teachers no longer have well-understood (if flawed) data to work with in the form of old SATS and old GCSEs. My expertise is now relying on years of experience, gut-feeling and a lot of translating between old and new money.

Unfortunately, the majority of teachers don’t have years of experience to fall back on because of the recruitment and retention crisis.

@bikerunski that's the Gove factor for you, I'm afraid...

I’m afraid you’re right @Heyha

As a parent I would want to know how well my children are doing at school. I totally agree that things like attendance in class are part of the equation but I still want to believe that when a teacher says to me they are doing well, it is really based on something that is factual, not just the teachers gut feeling.
As such I am not sure how you can get away from some kind of data. Having recently had the opportunity to see the variability of a teacher assessment of a piece of work when moderated across 10 different schools I was shocked by the level of difference which there was. I need to have more faith that when somebody says my child is doing well that this really does mean doing well when compared with other children in lots of other schools, not just that school and even that class.

I completely agree that teachers should be spending as much of their time teaching and educating, not being data nerds but pretty words on reports do not make me feel happy about that my child is doing well at school.

so, that variability is the very reason to me why this data should not be so foregrounded. How do you propose we solve this?

Really the only grade that matters is the ATL isn't it? I like Teensidea. How can anyone predict how a student will perform in three years hence? Obviously as a teacher I have a crystal ball and can foresee every stumbling block a young person will have put in their way.

What is ATL?

Attitude to learning, grades 1-4. I am lucky that my Dcs rarely get a '3'. At parent teacher evenings, especially in KS3, this is the score that I want the child and parent to focus upon.

Oh right. Yes, I agree with that!

As a parent of a y7 and a y9, the progress reports they brought home last week did put a slight dampener on things. 😐
My y9 who has always been on target with excellent effort grades is suddenly below for English despite parents evening at beginning of December saying he was fine.
My y7 who generally did very well at primary and was always above for maths is generally below for everything. All his grades for effort are poor which we have had words about.
To say I'm confused is an understatement with regards the y9 🤔

I think the classic exmaple is our mocks. We don't mark our own. When they are marked, they get spirited away to a data office where a young mystery man inputs marks, which generate grades eventually when put on a databank. We probably won't get the exam papers of our classes back til 6 weeks after they sat them by which point none of us will give a shit , or be able to give proper feedback. As teachers, we won't , in all likelihood, see the grades until after we have allocated effort grades and probably at the same time (or after) the students do! And, because we don't see the exams, we are unable to query any marks or marking, which , with the best will in the world, has been inconsistent (which is another reason why internal data is bollocks).

Now, this is all plainly completely bonkers. I will complain about this madcap system for the third year running and get nowhere.

@ladyoftheflowers could be so many reason for that after a term, some down to the system as much as anything else. With your yr9 it might be that they have just done an assessment and the teacher has decided/been told to just use that to put in the data, and you DC dipped on that particular one. The teacher may have stuck to 'on target' but somebody else may have rightly or wrongly moderated it afterwards. It may even be a typo or an admin error, unlikely but in 15 years I know I've done one or two of those (and been mortified). I have worked in a school that massaged figures in spite of what the teaching staff have input so I'm afraid it does go on although this new focus from Ofsted should knock some of that on the head.

With your yr7 it'll either be classic transition dip which is nothing to worry about at this time, or the school knocking yr7 down a bit to bring them back up to on target later in the year to make their progress look good....more likely to be about transition though. I teach science and we used to do a baseline with all yr7 due to the variation in accuracy of what the feeder schools said about their ability. Several were fantastic, spot on judgements and kids keen on science, one or two sent us students that had so many gaps and misconceptions that it affected their setting in yr7 but we ironed as much as possible out so they had a fair crack in year 8. You could tell when the school's swapped their yr6 teachers around as well!

So the yr9, maybe ask the question in Jan about why their performance has dipped recently, and the yr7 I would probably wait til half term before worrying too much.

@piggywaspushed Ofsted won't like that approach now so it may hastily die off (feedback not timely=useless). Could you go in and offer a compromise that you don't mark your own class but you swap with a colleague, assuming you're not a one man band department? That way they'll get done quick, you'll have the usual good idea of where they've struggled, but if your powers that be are worried about generous marking or whatever they won't have a leg to stand on if you're not doing your own. They might cling onto the cloak and dagger way of doing grade boundaries but at least the actual feedback the kids get will be valuable for them and you?

Piggy your mocks system imo is entirely bonkers. My mantra with the students is that mocks are a diagnostic tool for me as much as them. I need to know what they don't know/ find difficult/ lack confidence in etc. Usually followed with 'That is why you have to try and answer every question, otherwise we will be revising stuff you do know but couldn't be bothered to answer'. Your schools system takes all the empowerment away from the class teacher who is the very person who can make the difference between the mock and the 'real' exam. And, as been often argued, feedback is only taken on board if it is as immediate as is possible.

I refused to give grade predictions to my HOF, based on small tests and individual long answer questions. He can have raw scores of 7/12 etc and work it out because I will not put a grade to that. It's way, way, too vague and spurious. Yet it's expected that teachers can translate these marks into grades when it has little correlation with final grades.

Attitude, attendance and effort are massively important.

Thank god Ofsted might be seeing sense!

Why would you not mark your own mocks? You need that info to inform your teaching for the rest of Y11! What a bonkers system.

I think Ofsted are worried that if they said that they were interested in internal data and how it was generated, that they’d have to do something about how crap it is.

I’m always horrified at the thought that some parents get this data and actually pay attention to it.

Piggy That's outrageous! If a teacher doesn't see the results of the exams / actual papers in a timely fashion, how do you adjust your teaching to cover common weak points across the class?

I always imagined it went something like this (you teach English don't you?):

• questions split up amongst the English department, common feedback collated by the question markers
• marks bunged into a spreadsheet
• whole department meeting to discuss feedback and results
• teachers skim through results (and if necessary papers) for their class and use skim and department discussion to identify next steps for their class