Grade inflation and leading independent schools in London and beyond

[YesterdayandToday]

Last week, this was in the news. I am surprised nobody initiated a discussion on this (or maybe, I missed).

NLCS, SPGS and a many of the GDST's highlighted in the Times. What do you guys think?

"Teachers at dozens of private schools at least doubled the proportion of A*s handed out to their A-level pupils last year compared with 2019, when children last sat public exams, a new analysis shows.

In 2019, 16.1 per cent of private school pupils had their A-levels graded A*. In 2021 — when teachers decided what marks to award their pupils — the proportion jumped to 39.5 per cent.

Research by The Sunday Times shows for the first time the extent of the grade inflation in individual schools. At North London Collegiate School, a girls’ school in Edgware whose senior fees are more than £21,000 a year, the proportion of A* grades soared from 33.8 per cent in 2019 to 90.2 per cent last summer. The 56.4 percentage point increase is the highest recorded in the investigation."

"Among the leading private schools that have not published detailed A-level results are Eton College, King’s College School, Wimbledon, Westminster School and the Manchester Grammar School."

"At St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, west London, which has topped the Parent Power independent school rankings for nine of the past ten years, As rose from 52.1 per cent to 87.5 per cent. Derby High School saw A grades rise from 6.5 per cent to 53.9 per cent, a 47.4 percentage point rise, second only to North London Collegiate."

"At Eltham College in southeast London, A* grades rose from 29.1 per cent to 72.2 per cent, a 43.1 percentage point rise."

Also as others have pointed out if the school selects a student to be given a B although her exams papers are an A then the parents can sue the school. This happened at Guildford High in 2020 when the sixth form leadership misunderstood the Govt guidelines and dds got marked down in their A levels and missed uni places, the school hushed it up but lawyers were involved.

@sunshineclouds24 - so let me get this right, NCLS went from having about two thirds the proportion of A* candidates as, say, St Paul's in 2019 to being slightly better than St Paul's (itself one of the very fastest improvers amongst all of the c10k secondary schools in the entire country) in 2021, and you don't think there's even the faintest whiff of, how can I put it, funny business about any of this ?

I don't want to comment on individual schools, my dd got her GCSE results last summer and it was a truly awful time for all young people and it's so much better that they all got good grades compared to the previous year when dc missed uni places and ended up with grades that weren't reflective of their ability.

I would suggest that people read this and they will have a better understanding of the situation:

www.hmc.org.uk/blog/hmc-statement-following-record-breaking-assessment-results-and-sunday-times-coverage/

[quote SeasonFinale]I would suggest that people read this and they will have a better understanding of the situation:

www.hmc.org.uk/blog/hmc-statement-following-record-breaking-assessment-results-and-sunday-times-coverage/[/quote]
that is literally a quote from an advocacy body whose every last insert Latin word for coin of small value of funding comes from the private schools. it's self-serving claptrap.

Laughing at the thought that we should take the HMC article at face value, as fact. No bias whatsoever.

If you actually read it you will see that it is fairly obvious in a school where the majority or marks for a normal exam year are in the A-B range in a year where 6 in effect topic tests are used to assess the grade it is not that difficult for a child capable of a B across a 2 year syllabus under exam conditions at the end of 2 years to get an A or A in a test on a topic alone. Hence it follows on that there would be more A*/A grades under cags.

The same holds for the grammars who you criticise too for the same reasons. These are higher achieving kids who can produce A*/A on topic tests when they only need to revise a fraction of the syllabus so even those who get Bs at the end of the year over a 2 year syllabus in an exam can achieve higher under topic test conditions.

Some of them have been so blatant. Eltham College feature graph showing how much their exam results have improved and seem proud of the huge jumps made during the pandemic years - some heads are after one thing only....

"Headmaster Guy Sanderson said his school’s A-level success last year was ‘a reflection of the hard work of our bright students who prepared well for exams and assessments in difficult, regularly changing circumstances, and our highly capable and committed staff body who adapted seamlessly to a robust online teaching programme through the pandemic"

@ChnandlerBong - what do you mean by “some heads are after one thing only….”? Is this man a narcissist attention seeker or is he just naive with limited PR experience? Or is he a Boris Johnson type who subscribes to “no publicity is bad publicity”? I am rather intrigued why anyone would have chosen to go on record in this instance.

What is up at NLCS? Are they not usually quite professional and media savvy and well funded? Are there deeper issues going on there?

Will ISI inspect any of these schools and is this a red flag issue or will it be totally ignored?
I have noticed a lot of Ofsted inspections happening in the last 3 months in our area. I hope the ISI is equally busy.

He’s an ambitious man. Is regularly in the papers. Can’t comment as to whether he’s a narcissist but the focus on exam results is disproportionate- although I note the graphs showing the 5 year trends (that featured prominently previously) are nowhere on the website now……

[quote puffyisgood]**@sunshineclouds24* - so let me get this right, NCLS went from having about two thirds the proportion of A candidates as, say, St Paul's in 2019 to being slightly better than St Paul's (itself one of the very fastest improvers amongst all of the c10k secondary schools in the entire country) in 2021, and you don't think there's even the faintest whiff of, how can I put it, funny business about any of this ?[/quote]
Yup, with around 20% uplift, 56.4 percentage point increase for NLCS. SPGS did 36%.
I don't get the explanation that kids got mocks on easier topics, so they easily can get an A*.

yeah, I mean, between 2019 & 2021 NLCS went from being an undoubtedly high achieving school [e.g. just outside the top couple of dozen schools] to being the flat best or maybe second best in the country [based on this measure of the % of top A level grades] .

is it common, or even heard of, for a school's relative ranking to improve so much in such a short space of time? maybe it is, I can't say the rankings I ever spend too much time poring over. but it at least feels a bit dubious.

I assume you are comparing A level results with A level results from 2019 to 2021, however it is the cohort that matters in this instance and it is worth pointing out that the same girls achieved exceptional results in 2019.

I think it is deeply insulting to suggest that private school teachers set out to improve outcomes for their students over and above what said students might have deserved, That somehow we lack professionalism either because we want ourselves to look amazing or because we are incapable of impartiality or even just incapable of following rules.

It was a difficult time for private schools largely due to the fact we knew any over and above performance would be questioned and because we are very much subject to the threat of legal intervention should anything go wrong in the eyes of a parent who has paid for something they didn’t get.

I can’t explain the results mentioned in the OP. I can say, however, that in my school at least, we worked hard to give the children the results they deserved and we were prepared to fail students and did fail students who we know would have failed on a normal year. Nonetheless, we still had a larger number of top grades than normal but that also happened in the state sector. We worked hard, so did the students. There was perhaps bias in how some schools set about examining their students, reducing papers, being specific about revision requirements, testing, retesting with the same questions whilst others just gave the last paper available and used that year’s grade boundaries (and the 2020 grade boundaries were very low in my subject). There was probably localised bias in how every school went about it at some level.

I am not sure how it could have been made genuinely fair across the board in the circumstances. It is what it is. Schools who have deliberately over egged their pudding have made their futures very difficult when it comes to living up to the past. Inspection bodies are potentially going to have a field day in the coming years.

@LacasadeBernadaAlba

I think it is deeply insulting to suggest that private school teachers set out to improve outcomes for their students over and above what said students might have deserved, That somehow we lack professionalism either because we want ourselves to look amazing or because we are incapable of impartiality or even just incapable of following rules.

It was a difficult time for private schools largely due to the fact we knew any over and above performance would be questioned and because we are very much subject to the threat of legal intervention should anything go wrong in the eyes of a parent who has paid for something they didn’t get.

I can’t explain the results mentioned in the OP. I can say, however, that in my school at least, we worked hard to give the children the results they deserved and we were prepared to fail students and did fail students who we know would have failed on a normal year. Nonetheless, we still had a larger number of top grades than normal but that also happened in the state sector. We worked hard, so did the students. There was perhaps bias in how some schools set about examining their students, reducing papers, being specific about revision requirements, testing, retesting with the same questions whilst others just gave the last paper available and used that year’s grade boundaries (and the 2020 grade boundaries were very low in my subject). There was probably localised bias in how every school went about it at some level.

I am not sure how it could have been made genuinely fair across the board in the circumstances. It is what it is. Schools who have deliberately over egged their pudding have made their futures very difficult when it comes to living up to the past. Inspection bodies are potentially going to have a field day in the coming years.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, it's very helpful. Just curious, why do you think teachers at NLCS concluded that their students results were suddenly so much better than many years past? We'd be very interested in getting a teacher's perspective. Thank you.

@Herewegoagain78

I assume you are comparing A level results with A level results from 2019 to 2021, however it is the cohort that matters in this instance and it is worth pointing out that the same girls achieved exceptional results in 2019.

I did a quick [non exhaustive, just eyeballing the table in the Times article] checked and that's actually a perfectly fair point about the cohort [NLCS 2019 GCSE performance did, in relative ranking terms, indeed seem better than NLCS 2019 A level performance].

I think you can still question the extent of the improvement and e.g. that the same NLCS did worse than St Paul's in 2019 GCSE but better than St Paul's in 2021 A level but, yeah, as above the cohort point is a fair one.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, it's very helpful. Just curious, why do you think teachers at NLCS concluded that their students results were suddenly so much better than many years past?

Presumably whatever testing they engaged in told them that?

I do think it is worth remembering that private schools on the whole continued teaching through lockdown (we even managed online co-curricular activities which was no mean feat, believe me) which didn't happen in many state schools during the first lockdown and if my children's school is anything to go by, barely happened in the second. Children already at an advantage with smaller class sizes would have gained an even greater advantage as a result. Couple that with low grade boundaries on the 2020 November papers which many of us used for our exams last year and more people have higher grades than ever before. And of course, there is always difference in cohorts - some years you get all As, some years you don't.

I am not suggesting that such schools didn't over egg the pudding. But there is a lot that happened that would have given those students huge advantage, given the overall situation.

If you can think about it from a low grade boundaries perspective...

if normally the A grade is at 75% but the 2020 paper was at 65% then everyone who would normally have got a grade B was suddenly an A,, assuming they were performing at a normal level in less than normal circumstances. In the majority of cases we would perhaps have expected less than average performance but if you've been taught the whole time, you are massively advantaged over those who haven't been. It's possibly an over-simplistic way of deciding those grades - but a legitimate one based on the published grade boundaries from the 2020 paper rather than trying to make up your own as a school. Remember - if you as a parent see your child's paper, see they got 65% and then look up the grade boundaries, you will know your child could/should have got an A. If the school gave your child a B because they were trying to play to what they considered 'normal', they would be opening themselves up to legal challenge because you know that there will be others out there who got 65% and got given the A.

You also need to remember that we were threatened with our schools being the ones that were picked for scrutiny - so a school that just made up grades (which I think is what you are suggesting) was leaving itself way open to problems if picked. It was a small percentage of schools picked, but I know we came up in a couple of subjects (not mine) and had to send off all our evidence. So scrutiny happened. Not for every school in every subject, but it happened.

I've only just found this thread, but I might as well share my experience of being a teacher in an independant school in spring 2020. During that period our department spent a lot of time looking at large amounts of student data including the historical records of improvement from mock to actual exam. Based on that and a very good understanding of our pupils' abilities, we came up with a set of predicted grades for the cohort. We had sprinkled a little bit of fairy dust over those grades, but not so much as to be unreasonable. These were submitted to SLT who insisted that we rework them and inflate them greatly. Normally in our cohort there would have been two or three students that achieved a grade 3. They were upgraded on the very first amendment. There was a lot of pressure put on us to "up" all our predictions. The quote from management was "We'll bump them up, let the boards bring them down, let the boards take the blame."

Over about a month, there was a lot of negotiation between management and our department and there were at least three iterations of the grades, with each new set of grades being more optimistic than the last. We had hour-long department meeting after department meeting, reworking the figures after each time they had been sent back to us because they were not what the Boss wanted.

Eventually the head and our department settled for a set of grades and whilst we as a department felt that they were too optimistic to be realistic, we settled for those and we even got a written agreement that these were the grades that would be sent off to the board.

At that stage no one knew that the grades submitted would be the ones that would be awarded.

When they came back, we discovered that despite agreement from SLT that the grades we'd agreed upon would be sent off, they had been altered upwards without us being told.

When we returned to school in the autumnm and asked the head about this the response was simply "I'm the boss, I'll do what I think is best for the school, if there's any fallout, I'll take the "rap"".

So, in our case it was simply a smash and grab. Having seen that such actions could be got away with in 2020, we repeated the exercise in 2021. By then our departmet was so browbeaten that it wasn't worth arguing and our department meetings that required us to evaluate grades simply consisted of us saying "Yeah, whatever the boss wants. You want us to find evidence for a grade 8? I'm sure we can cook something up". Sad but that's how it happened.

That period was the low point in my teaching career. I felt that integrity and fairness had been sacrificed and that we had been involved in a smash and grab to get what you can, while you can. Whilst it is a great school with great kids, who I love teaching (each morning I look forward to going into work to teach them) on this occassion it was the "grown ups" that screwed up.

I felt sorry for the schools who had been fair and realistic about their students' abilities, for they were the ones that lost out and hats off to those schools whose predictions were within the margins of previous performance.

Of course we weren't the only ones that looted, and that accounts for the overall inflation of the grades.

Interesting (and shocking) story, quitoldad!

We will probably see some smaller private schools closing over the next few years (falling birthrates, COL and stuff like VAT), and I think there will be limited sympathy in part because we saw some private schools engaging in this kind of behavior. Unfair, in many cases, perhaps, as the schools that are hit by the above issues and forced to close may not necessarily be the ones that did unethical stuff during COVID.

Yes, indeed, very interesting, and not unsurprising to me. As an academic, I've seen a massive drop-out and failure rate in this cohort, which came in with inflated teacher-awarded grades for very little work and expected this to continue at university. And, yes, a lot of these students were educated in independent schools. These schools have done their students few favours in the long (or medium) run, but perhaps I guess they were just as interested in their own statistics and league table positions, if not more.

independant
Strange spelling mistake