Could any teachers explain how they will arrive at teacher assessed grades for their students?

[AlexaShutUp]

Just wondering what process you will follow in order to assess students, especially for GCSEs?

DD is in year 11 and did mocks just before Christmas. She worked really hard through lockdown and took the mocks seriously, so would be very happy to get her mock results as her final grades but I appreciate that it's much more complex than this, and that teachers will probably be expected to use a range of different data. I'm also aware that lots of schools haven't even done their mocks yet. I just wondered what other kind of assessment might be taken into account, especially as the kids were out of school for such long chunks of last year and are now likely to be off for a long stretch again.

I fully trust in the judgment of teachers and I'm sure that they normally have a very good idea of where their students are at, but I wonder how confident they feel about assessing kids who have been in and out of school for so many months. DD had two new teachers in September who have only known her for a term. They both seem brilliant but they haven't really had much of a chance to get to know the kids. She didn't submit a huge amount of work last term as they went easy on them at the start of term and then they were mostly revising. I guess there will be work to submit remotely in the coming months, and data from the first half of year 10.

I just wonder how it's all going to work?

We don’t know yet there is no guidance

I should add, I'm not worried about dd's grades, as I'm pretty confident that she'll do well with teacher assessment as she would have done with exams. I'm just curious about the process and about how assessments will be made.

No one knows. I doubt Gavin Williamson does either.

We don’t know yet there is no guidance

Well, that doesn't surprise me. Am I right in thinking that it is likely to be harder this year because of how much school the kids have missed? I'm assuming that most teachers were probably able to make a reasonably accurate assessment of last year's cohort.

Last year we had more data, more time etc.

No actual guidance yet, but I imagine that like last year we will use the mocks and assessments we've done so far, as well as our understanding of how much students tend to improve between Jan and exams.

But I predict the big difference this year will be that we will keep Y11 students going with remote learning, continuing to teach and assess them throughout the rest of the academic year. It will give us a chance to gather more data, as well as look after them better than we did last year.

Online engagement with my Y11s so far has been so high ‐ they want to keep going and prove themselves.

Thanks for the response, Nellle. It's good to know that online engagement has been high so far. It's such a weird situation for the kids (and teachers) to find themselves in.

Agree with@Nellle. The only feedback we can give at the moment is continue working hard, continue working towards the grades they deserve.

Many schools worked on the basis that similar could happen this year and therefore set work to be completed, submitted and marked. Last time there was a cut off that no work after 20 March could go towards the final grade. As yet there is no cut off date this time and once the 2 week consultation has taken place we may know when grades needs to be submitted to exam boards. Therefore my advice would be to make sure she engages well with any work set, any online classes as every piece of work from now on will more likely than not feed into her final grades.

I'm a parent not a teacher but, if it's any help, I can share what our school did for GCSE students last year (my son was in that GCSE year). They continued to do assessments until May half term, having taken the view that, although the guidance was that further assessment wasn't necessary after the mid March date, neither did it preclude further exams.
My son had a French oral exam over Zoom with his teacher, exams in the three sciences and maths : the school emailed out the exam papers at a given time, pupils had to complete them, scan their answers and email them back by the deadline. A couple of the science assessments were online multiple choice questions. (The types of questions were application rather than knowledge to limit the temptation to look up answers). He had coursework type work for English, history, French and geography and they were asked to produce a portfolio of their best work, including from their mocks.
Not sure whether it transpired to be the case or not, but school said that students had the opportunity to improve on their mocks grade, but that they wouldn't be revised downwards. Harder this year as I'm guessing not all pupils have sat mocks.
My son was a bit frustrated that his friends at other schools downed tools in mid March (particularly as he'd worked hard for his mocks so was happy with those grades), but in fairness to school, they were trying to provide evidence to support assessed grades and help those pupils that perhaps hadn't performed to their potential in the mocks.
It did all become a bit stressful in the week of the results with the chopping and changing of the basis for GCSE grades...!

Sorry, to add one point about new teachers. My son had asked to be moved down a maths set so only had his new maths teacher for a few weeks before lockdown. They looked at exams and tests taken over the 2 year period (plus the extra maths exam sat) and spoke to his previous two maths teachers so, thankfully, his grade wasn't impacted by having a new teacher.