Flight paths in secondary are nonsense and demotivating for pupils SAY OFSTED

[noblegiraffe]

Ofsted finally saying what I’ve been banging on about for years. Flight paths are bollocks and schools shouldn’t be producing them.

So if your school does, hopefully Ofsted not being keen might make them reconsider!

No, I meant occult as in hidden. For initiates only.

After 20 years I can tell you what grade your child is going to get. I teach English and am rarely wrong in my estimates. Sad thing is these are often not what a pupil is predicted whether higher or lower.

The flight paths lead to further inaccuracies and leads to teachers to making up grades to ensure that they look like they are doing their jobs properly and pupils are reaching target.

Cool I’ve spent enough years on MN answering threads where parents query what the figures on their DC’s report means to know that parents don’t know that they’re meaningless, made up, no science behind them.

Yes, and you put them right, presumably, noble.

Would you do the same if a parent was question a teacher's professional judgement?

You’re told that the teacher made them up in a couple of seconds : this is where we diverge , noble. I am not allowed to do that. Our data is robust ly made up by the data guy based on inaccurately marked and moderated half termly benchmarking asessments.

Yes, but Pig within the media teachers are quite happy to critique the assessments they find onerous. Less likely to criticise each other's professional judgement. I'm far happier with forms of assessing which are open to criticism and scrutiny than those which are seen as representative of the integrity of a whole profession and thus likely to be only defended by those belonging to that profession.

cool, sure, I question teacher’s professional judgement, if it’s something I have enough info to form an opinion on. For example ‘my DS got a 3 in his mocks and they’ve entered him for Higher, what do you reckon?’ Or ‘my kid who got a 9 is being told not to do A-level maths because they’re not good enough, what do you reckon?’.

if it’s something I have enough info to form an opinion on

The the whole nature of 'professional judgement' over 'onerous data collection' is that there is less information made available to work with. As a pp said, it is 'not easily reportable assessment'.

Do you think that teachers will stop doing assessments of pupils if they don’t have to give them a GCSE grade every term?

In fact, I said my assessment is not easy to report because I collect a lot of data.

What I can't get my head around are teachers on here telling us to trust teachers' professional judgements whilst then admitting to making up and plucking out of thin air meaningless figures on students reports??? Either you are professional or you make things up?

If a school only uses made up data to compile flight paths and then set unmoderated tests that aren't marked properly in order to set targets for students then yes, I would agree that is poor.

But not all schools do that. My children's school worked with another school to set exam questions across year groups that could be assessed to give an accurate assessment of where that student was at that time but also a value to plot onto a flight path.

So if a level 5 at yr 6 ends on an A* at yr 11 then by yr 10 they should be looking at a B, say. Yrs 9,8 and 7 were then given values ascribed by school. It worked.

If I compare to when I was at school we got marked A - G with + and - so A, A-, B+,B,B- and so on. These grades were given from 1st year to 5th form and for 2 years at 6th form.

In 1st year I could get an A, 2nd year B+, 3rd year A-, 4th year C.. That tells you nothing. Was I progressing? Was a C in 4th year better or worse than a B+ in 2nd year?

Marking like this makes little sense either.

Professional judgement is open to critique and scrutiny though - but not by parents. In fact, most teachers invite it - I’ll often ask a colleague what they think of an exam answer or piece of work. We moderate as a department. We get observed by other members of staff. They drop into lessons, look at folders, read exam papers we’ve set. There’s nothing I do during any day I could keep secret even if I wanted to (which I don’t). We’re all held accountable every day, by other teachers. And that’s what a profession is, surely? I have no metric to know whether my GP is any good, but I trust that the medical profession has its own ways of judging GPS and weeding out those who are failing.

My children's school worked with another school to set exam questions across year groups that could be assessed to give an accurate assessment of where that student was at that time but also a value to plot onto a flight path.

This is bollocks. Total bollocks. Schools joining up with another school to colloborate on bollocks doesn’t make it any less shit.

No. However the criteria for assessment will be less transparent. As I said earlier, when teachers complain over tasks they find onerous, the limitations and flaws over various types of reporting become apparent. Yet, if they were only required to use professional judgement there would be less vocal complaining. The varying methodology would be much more opaque, the meaningfulness or lack of, remaining undisclosed.

We’re all held accountable every day, by other teachers

In other words it's a closed shop. For initiates only. Teachers will follow their own interests, like many others do.

Like the church, for decades, feeling able to investigate and deal with priests accused of abuse....

What do you mean by professional judgement? What is the process that takes a mark on a test that is not a GCSE, and turns it into a GCSE grade, if it is not professional judgement? And how does that differ from a teacher using the same assessment and telling you whether your child is making good progress or not? What is the advantage of one over the other?

TheFallen
With one the teacher openly complains and states the limitations with the other any limitations are not admitted as it would reflect on their capabilities as a professional.

Good heavens at the abuse analogy. Anyway...
Schools are accountable for exam results. Teachers are accountable for exam results. People lose their jobs over exam results.

Yes, but the basis, I would have thought in deciding who would have to go, would take into consideration the reliability of the data which is available. That is, not based on a prediction made regarding GCSE potential that was made in year 7.

However, the act of making a variety of data available, promotes discussion. Which is good for transparency and professional development.

Good heavens at the abuse analogy.

Why are teachers implicitly more trustworthy than priests? Or should the same rigour of safeguards apply to both organisations?

Professionals need to be judged, independently, by people outside of the profession.

Glad that Ofsted are going to reduce/eliminate the importance they attach to flight paths, internal progress data and fancy spread sheets in general.

I was stunned when I found out that secondary schools use English and Maths SATS results to 'predict grades' for French, Geography, DT and goodness knows what else. The head at one of the secondary schools we went to look round proudly announced that her school starts talking to children about 'where they are' in relation to their GCSE targets as soon as they step into the door in Y7.

Which made me think why bother with GCSEs then if it's all been decided at aged 11. Several Y11 children I know have spent the whole of secondary being told that they're 'not where they should be' because their SATS levels were used to conjure up a high predicted GCSE grade. Others families have spent years telling the school that their child doesn't understand something/isn't making much progress, although it's 'fine' for the school because their SATS results 'predicted' a lower grade.

Utterly bonkers.

Schools are judged by Ofsted. Which takes us nicely full circle to the OP. The person in charge of judging schools from the outside thinks flight paths are nonsense and doesn't want to look at schools' internal data. There you go.

I was stunned when I found out that secondary schools use English and Maths SATS results to 'predict grades' for French, Geography, DT and goodness knows what else.

Well no, schools don't. The government and Ofsted do this. They used to work out value added based on it but now it's progress 8 and attainment 8.

It's Ofsted that has forced schools to produce more and more data to prove to them that students at all stages made progress. Now suddenly it's all being thrown out. But it won't last. It never does.

National Curriculum levels were abolished in 2014 - the laudable intention was to do away with the “labelling” effect of assigning numbers to children and instead to encourage more meaningful assessment and feedback.

However... schools were very used to spreadsheets and management reports which demanded simple numerical measures. In many cases schools simply replaced levels with “grades” which superficially resemble GSCE grades (which conveniently switched from alphabetic to numeric form).

But these numbers are not GCSE grades, they’re just... numbers. Assessments are not standardised across schools (or sometimes even within schools). Teachers are required to enter numbers into systems and spreadsheets, and we do our best, but the numbers are meaningless so we have no choice but to make them up.

Yes they do, LittleChristmas. What do you think FFT grades are based on?