The Fifteenth Republic - A Level and GCSE Results storm coming!

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff. Baiters and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here only if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

If you are fed up with cakes and biscuits there is now a cheeseboard on offer

If you come with a stick to beat us with then please do so elsewhere and not in the staffroom

It said that before too!

@Piggywaspushed urban myth swallowed by my Head (who isn't easily fooled) and many many others, to the extent that some have quoted it to parents?

The 2 July guidance has been updated twice already - 27 July and 7 August. But not today (yet), the date they actually told schools it would be....

Sorry Piggy, think I was just more sensitive to it this time in light of yesterday!

Can you imagine what post results analysis in 2021 is going to be like in some schools if England and Wales follow the Scotland route? Well HOD, I see that your results have slipped by 10% 20% on the 2020 cohort.....what will you do to get them back up to and beyond that in 2022 - an impossible ask.

My head absolutely loves going through data with a fine tooth comb. He will totally and utterly forget what happened to make to 2020 data so inflated. I am not concerned - I know my predicted grades were as fair and accurate as they could possibly be, and in line with my data over the last 5 years, but some schools will have shot up this year - unsustainable.

Do you work in my school @noideaatallreally We have a data obsessed maniac head too.

I haven't seen a solution that beats exams in terms of eliminating unconscious bias.

What I’ve found really interesting with this, Herc, is we were told repeatedly that teacher assessment would disadvantage the most disadvantaged and that we would have lower expectations, but what actually seems to have happened in Scotland is that teachers were over-optimistic for the disadvantaged students compared to last year’s results.

Boys and girls seem to have been treated fairly equally, I would love to see a breakdown by ethnicity to see if teachers really downgrade black students.

Of course it raises the question of if teachers were aware of these markers when they were ordering their spreadsheets.

Really tough question on Teacher Tapp today.
Which is it harder to teach in:
A boiling hot classroom or
A freezing cold classroom.

Genuinely torn. But today is making me tend towards the boiling hot.

Definitely! I can teach in thermals and layers. I can't teach in bra and pants...

@ineedaholidaynow Ha! I’m not that hopeful.

They are going to push it to the very last second and make us all scrabble around. Like they did with closures. Bam! No warning !

I reckon it's harder to teach in excess heat. You just want to flop.
At least when it's cold you can layer up and you have to be energetic.
Anyway, we're about to find out this coming term!

If you’ve had warning, you can layer up! I taught in a really cold classroom last year once a fortnight and once I realised, I remembered to put on double socks and avoid numb toes but before then even with coats on it was pretty awful.

I also taught in a hut and one day the heating didn’t come on overnight and it was so cold we had to find another classroom. I guess you can’t do that when it’s hot.

Boiling hot every time. The kids are awful in the heat. Luckily my windowless room never gets too hot or too cold. It's basically a cave.

I think it would be cold for me. I can't stand it, the kids would moan about the coats and knowing my school coats would have to be off or they would be too layered up to write.

But then I could hold a hot water bottle. Hmmm

I've been told to forget any idea of teaching the new year 6 the year 5 stuff they were not taught. I'll be doing that in after school interventions, apparently. Because god forbid progress slips as a result of a worldwide pandemic.

Except I won't be doing them. I will leave asap after the kids, shower when I get home, and spend time with my kids and my mum who I am increasingly concerned will get it from me. Plus I am REALLY struggling to find a carer to pop in to her come September so I need to be home as early as I can. Although she doesn't need help toilet wise etc I just can't trust her to cook now.

@HipTightOnions

I can't speak for other teachers, but every estimate we made was accurate and achievable for the pupil.

Trouble is, we all genuinely believe this, but the overall effect is an apparently dramatic improvement in results, in a year when schooling has been disrupted. That is just not plausible.

I don't think everyone believes it actually. I'm sure some staff know they over-estimated. We (my faculty) didn't as I know the process we went through to come up with the results. A small uptake so a big difference in results year to year depending on who picks it. We failed students who needed failing. We were two weeks from the start of study leave when we shut so the year wasn't disrupted from a course content point of view, I was onto revision. We didn't assess them on the time they weren't there I can't predict who would be thrown by the question/stop revising/have a panic attack/not show up (all of which I've seen happen in the past) so I couldn't estimate based on that. I used the work they submitted throughout the year, and their prelims. Maybe it's the exam system that doesn't always provide a fair assessment of students' abilities.

We have spent years trying to tackle disadvantage due to social class/poverty, the government has spent loads of money on this in schools in the last couple of years in the form of PEF funding so why wouldn't there be an improvement in the performance of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds?

why wouldn't there be an improvement in the performance of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds?

It would be a remarkable improvement for the pass rate to increase by 20% in a year. Does that feel right for the improvements that you’ve seen?

I'm not going to comment on what other teachers have done. In my own school, and class, this isn't a particular issue it's fairly leafy. What I think based on my last school, but don't know, is that pupils have done better at work in class than they might be expected to do in an external exam, and the grades are based on this continuous assessment if you like whereas they might have flunked the exam. We have had so many changes to our qualifications in the last few years, any patterns have to be looked at in that light - the N5 assessment was longer than the Higher one last year, the whole Higher was rejigged as well. I haven't seen consistency in my own subject since Higher Still came in (around 2001!)

There is updated advice for school transport from the DFE- have students always been advised to wear masks on dedicated school transport?there are also comments about PPE - those of you on the ball might be able to spot if these are changes!

why wouldn't there be an improvement in the performance of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds?

No reason at all. But my school will not demonstrate any such improvement because we took account of Ofqual’s guidelines. Our first iteration resulted in a huge improvement - on paper - on last year. Who can say whether this was legitimate? Anyway, we revised our grades downwards because we knew that otherwise Ofqual would do it for us. Have our pupils made less improvement than the school down the road that was more generous? How could we ever know?

I looked at the transport bit closely, as I do bus duty and I think it is the same. I think they just added the age 11 bit.

Bus duty is going to be carnage.

Decided to be a bit facetious today and have posted this in AIBU: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3992957-To-sod-SD-as-when-I-return-to-teaching-in-Sept-it-isn-t-possible

Let’s see what response I get!

I am a year 6 moderator, and I still mark A Level too. On occasion I have moderated lk2 and uks2. Without fail non exam years over estimate achievement with the biggest overestimate coming between year 4/5. When i've led INSET and done blind moderation of work teachers are mostly shocked by how far their students are placed back. I used to moderate GCSE coursework and it was the same then.

It is really hard to be blindly objective. There are always those children who could do it, with a wing and a prayer and a good rear wind. A good portion of any cohort is made up of those waverers. The exam takes away those decisions from us. But how can we genuinely predict for them? So much depends on the day for so many of them. It's why I hate the whole testing system. And the concept of higher and lower tier papers too.

Oh God mother : DUCK!!!

Remember, YOU are not allowed to go to the pub, meet elderly relatives, go on holiday or go to a supermarket. YOU are a TEACHER and a guardian of all morality.

I don't know if it's new or not but it's very clear that masks worn on buses should be removed and stored when entering school. I think it's clear that (without a huge u-turn) that they don't want schools to allow masks in school.