Temporary broom closet in lieu of staff creating a staffroom

[TheHoneyBadger]

Just in case she got lucky and is in the one school that still goes to the pub.

Tom Sherrington, iirc, was head of a really fancy school then took a job at a really challenging school, tried to improve things, got inspected by Ofsted, rated inadequate he thought unfairly, resigned, shamed in the press and had a mental breakdown.

Then he became a consultant, and has spoken out a lot about how shit Ofsted are. I suspect that seeing how the DfE and media are treating heads and schools right now is affecting him quite personally after his treatment by the media.

I remember when target grades were first brought in. My own DD was doing GCSEs at that time and she was furious that she was predicted an A in maths but BB in double science. She was far better at science than maths (actual grades were B and AA). I remember at a staff meeting saying that this would reduce pupils to a string of grades rather than actual children, thinking and learning.
As far as I know - but am happy to be corrected - target grades (and the huge bureaucratic effort underpinning them) were brought in on no actual evidence other than Ofsted stating that children did better if encouraged to aim high, for example if given a target grade, which pretty much stands to reason anyway, and good teachers have always done it. I’ve never seen proper research to substantiate it - retrospectively, it’s difficult to compare different cohorts or use markers such as university applications because there are so many confounding factors in the constantly changing world of education.
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying target grades, flight paths and whatever are of no value, just that quite how valuable they are (and how they are generated) is open to dispute. They are probably most useful in forcing schools to consider all pupils’ attainment, rather than just the ones they think deserve to do well. Personally I think the thing most useful in driving up standards was criterion-referenced marking, which clarified exactly what students had to know and do in order to succeed.

That makes sense of the anger that he is directing at the various inept government bodies.

I was the generation who learnt under the literacy and numeracy hours in junior school.

Today I'm spending the say making Roscon (Spanish 3 kings cake) for our Reyes (epiphany) celebration.

I hate giving target or predicted grades. Happy to say whether someone should go for higher tier or foundation, and say what their mock results were - anything else can be counter productive in my experience - some predicted high grades start coasting, those predicted low grades give up.
So NO from me.

Wrt A levels - I'm another one who did S levels and did the Maths FMaths Phys Chem thing. No one ever encouraged me to do Oxbridge though - but I do remember being pulled into the headmaster's office and told off for not applying - but it just hadn't occurred to me that I could be an Oxbridge student!

Learnt no grammar except in Latin and French. Did Home economics and no DT for girls.... Also did a term of "etiquette"

[quote Appuskidu]That Tom Sherrington is v vocal about GW! Is he a current HT?

Has started a petition to get rid of Gav as well!

www.change.org/p/boris-johnson-the-resignation-of-gavin-williamson[/quote]
Well I think I might just love him❤️

I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying target grades, flight paths and whatever are of no value,

Ooh I’ve been saying flight paths and computer generated targets applied to individuals are of no value for years. Worse than useless. Before I was running a “stealth campaign to close schools” on here () I was running an open one to bin flight paths and to stop telling parents FFTs.

I’m with @noblegiraffe on target grades. So many of the pupils think they’re the grade they’ll get without any effort. They’re counterproductive a lot of the time and often only reflective of how SATs focussed a feeder school is.

Speaking of target grades we have been told we can't give year 13 their mock results. I fear a school algorithm ahead...

Haha. Some of us may even have been handmaidens to your previous campaign, Noble.

Happily I retired before flight paths became a thing. I imagine it’s just target grades with lots more data, in fancy dress and on a new PowerPoint. There’s probably something even more complicated now.
I agree that sharing this stuff with parents is a mistake, unless you want to spread the anxiety and pressure around a bit, which is always tempting. My experience was that even talk about National Curriculum levels was confusing for many parents, so I avoided it as far as possible.

Target grades are useless in my subject. Slight correlation with how they do in maths but definitely doesn't bear witness to scrutiny really.

Flight paths scare me.
Boy in year 11 with EHCP which took years for him to get. Based on fft he "should" get a 3 in English. But now he has support, I have evidence of 6 (and that's based on real grade boundaries, not the made up ones the dept use which are stupidly generous) I'm already afraid that I won't be allowed to CAG him at 6.
Girl in year 10; FFT says 8. She's done not a stroke of work all year. I expect a grade 2 at best. Hod didn't like it when I put that in her data because it's "adrift"

Last thing - yes, target grades for individuals can be useless and counter productive, and often are. (My experience of the FFT predictions were that they were about 80% accurate on an individual basis - are they still a thing?). But I can remember the days when whole swathes of children were written off as never likely to achieve in education at all, for all sorts of reasons, including snobbery and prejudice (especially in the secondary modern system). No one ever bothered to suggest they might be capable of succeeding. Having externally generated target grades went some way to changing that.

I am not a fan of flight paths and target grades for many reasons. Pupils with high targets can sometimes become complacent in thinking they don't have to work. Equally, those with lower targets can feel there is no point trying.

My Y10s all have 'target grades' if 1-3 but I am encouraging them to aim as high as they can and on the whole, they are rising to the challenge. Working really hard. Even remotely this week, they have been completing the forms quizzes I set with good results and are keen to send me photos of their work from the live lessons -I am seeing good work, well presented in their books and I have had excellent attendance all week.

We do need to be careful about pigeon holing pupils imo.

Slept for over 12 hours..that was much needed!

If you lot carry on I'll have to build a new broom closet! Please don't leave your mugs to go mouldy in here this time!

I went back into teaching after a long break in FE pastoral and supply and had to ask someone what all the talk of runways were about I'm not a fan of kids just doing the task for their flight path and remind them it's the basement not the ceiling and they should always be aiming higher. Quite often I look at the slide and go god no, you're all doing at least yellow and half of you blue.

Oh and this year with no sats, and whatever those online exams the year 7s did last term setting flight paths, I have kids with the highest flightpath that I'm looking at and going eh??? How's that gonna work then. Really bizarre results to the point that I wonder if the software went wrong and allocated the results to the wrong names or something.

I was just looking back over old posts about flight paths, and found this thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/2979988-School-reports-which-give-your-kids-GCSE-grades-or-flightpaths-are-bollocks and found me linking to Tom Sherrington on flightpaths which neatly brings together two of our topics of conversation this morning (Good to see that my style of thread title hasn't changed much over the years....)

I have just realised that for years, I've been talking about how teachers can't award kids accurate GCSE grades based on classwork and it's all nonsense and should be binned, and that's now EXACTLY what we're expected to do with CAGs 🤦‍♀️

I posted this in 2012 "The only relatively reliable way to get an overall level in maths is a comprehensive exam which covers all areas of maths"

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/1430501-Im-a-maths-teacher-and-I-make-up-sub-levels

I think differentiation is (or used to be) a more subtle art form than colour coding a slide of tasks.

My student does things like orange- you will write down one fact, pink- you will write down two facts, yellow- etc. That's not differentiation ffs though it probably ticks some box somewhere. Can't really blame her as a lot of my department planning looks like that hence me going scrap that we're all doing this and blues I expect to also be able to show how.....

I hate the way kids have taken on their colours like bloody self fulfilling prophesies - but I'm only magenta miss, I can't do that

I have kids on orange that are flagrantly more than able but sussed out young that if they pretend to be thick they don't have to put any effort in. Pretty fucking smart move really

I work in an independent school and we are usually about ten years behind. We use target grades but how does the ‘flight path’ work? And another question, are keyworker and vulnerable children being Covid tested if they are in school?

I'm so old that I miss using NC levels for ks3 and I miss CATS being on the register because I find them way more useful than sats as they measure the kids ability/affinity for skill sets rather than their previous schools ability to teach to test.

We're not allowed to do all most some stuff any more.
We're testing anyone in school who's given consent. That was 8 students this week. Everyone else was staff.

noble ABSOLUTELY!

We can't say "changing the subject of a formula" is grade 4 anymore than we can say 'John Smith' is a grade 4. They're both bollocks statements.

I actually wish they'd kept maths.