The Sixty-Sixth Republic - Who will be the medal winners on Results Day? Grade inflation predicted again

[Staffholidayclubrep]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement for school staff to let off steam.

Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

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

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

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 booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation.

Am bemused.
Dd (16) went for her covid jab 1 today. Didnt come out with a 2nd appointment date and said she had been told she would next be offered a jab.... when she turns 18. She had been told they have rethought the jabs for 16 and 17 year olds in light of the side effects and that they were expecting the decision to vaccinate her age range to be overturned very soon.
Which is news to me!

They have slways said this is one dose thus far for under 18s until more data comes in on side effects of a second dose. Sounds like someone in the vaccine centre said something a bit unclear!

That is exciting, Dolly

Good luck dolly!

Oo dolly you’ll have to report back. Hope he’s decent.

I read something yesterday saying they’re very linkely to go ahead with just the normal gap (can’t remember if said 8 or 12 weeks) for 16-17 year olds, it’s just that they want a few more weeks’ data from the States etc first. Serious adverse reactions in this age group have all been following the second dose.

Exciting @DollyMixtureLulus, have fun!

Calum Semple on BBC1.

Thanks piggy. I must have missed that bit of info somewhere.

It was in the original announcement for healthy 16/17 year olds - one dose only for now. Decision to be made on second dose soon after more data.

It implied they thought one dose would give good protection (from being very ill) and most problematic side effects (myocarditis) were after second dose so better to wait on more data.

16/17 who live with CEV or are themselves vulnerable still to have 2 doses.

Certainly, DS1 was least ill in my gang after his one quite recent Pfizer dose.

Jcvi said 80% protection from hospitalisation with one dose.

They also said “Data from the US suggests that, in males aged 12 to 17 years, 9.8 cases of myocarditis were reported per million first doses given. This rises to 67 per million after the second dose. Most people recovered quickly.”

Can covid seem like sinusitis?
Think i got it from swimming on holiday (so not then covid).
( no fever/chills or leg aches)

According to lots of threads and my nasal passages, yes...

Hi Janglybeads, don't worry about the meet up thingy, I would have been on holiday during your end of term so not checking the thread as often - I can't come this time (back at school next week anyway!) but the distance itself isn't an object to me and I'd quite like to be "on the list" in case you ever decamp somewhere else en masse and I'm left talking to myself! I'll see if I still have Skype anywhere and pm you.

I have just read another lovely exam thread on AIBU. Did the exam boards really take the money for marking exams and not return it to schools to give to those of you who did the marking?!? How can that be justified - or legal??? I thought it better to ask here and not on there.

Hope you are feeling better, piggy

I moderated the work of 230 students and got paid not one penny. I might work out what the board would have paid me for that... but it might make me angry!

We are due up here to get £400 in the next month or so. Well if you're full time. I doubt that makes you for the extra work of, say, an English teacher in the last few months.

Good grief. So they’ve pocketed the cash (in England) or most of the cash (Scotland) for a job they haven’t done? In the olden days, Panorama would have been investigating. How much do people normally get paid for marking exam papers?

I get something in the region of £5 per script. I marked 108 pieces of my own work for free.
On top of that, I get about £50 for monitoring each person in my team.
I did that for my 9 colleagues, twice, for free.
I get paid a fee for leading a meeting. I did two of those, for free.
I might have to put a bill in 😂

It's a joke. I can't believe the barefaced cheek of the exam boards!

Our pupils sat the full exams for our subject (bar the lit text ofqual allowed them to drop).

I marked:

31 x GCSE English Lang paper 1
31 x GCSE Lit Paper 1
31 x GCSE Lit Paper 2
9 x Alevel Poetry and drama exam

We had 2 days of moderation. All papers were not named so headed just by candidate number. The time spent inputting the data was obscene.

We did have a lovely thank you email from the deputy and a box of artisan cupcakes from the Head. Doesn’t compare to £5 a script though.

And that AIBU thread has made me angry, plus Sarah Vine has a column today that will no doubt blame us too. I didn’t know whose paper I was marking. We had to sit through an hour of unconscious bias training. A-level I did know. My class had 9 girls - I knew their handwriting - but all the grades had to go through a rigorous process. If our TAGs were out of line with part performance we had a meeting with our line manager - not my HoD, the line manager of our dept.

I miss the days when we were hated as we finish at 3 and have 14 weeks holiday. To be told we’re to blame for why state school pupils are failing in all aspects of life is outrageous.

I'm not sticking up for the exam boards but Pearson released some info explaining the fees and that paying exam markers isn't a huge proportion of the entry fee. A lot of the fee is to cover their fixed costs for writing, data analysing, office costs etc. I think teachers should have been given extra pay, like in Scotland. However we had plenty of inexperienced staff not involved at all in the TAG process (at least 30% of teaching staff). Paying them would piss people off even more!

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9892359/SARAH-VINE-GCSE-gap-state-private-schools-new-class-divide-shames-Britain.html

Unions blamed twice. Think my favourite line was referring to her who made fantastic inroads into education only to be blocked by those pesky unions!

I would love some sort of acknowledgement of all the work we did for marking the exams and coming up with grades. I did know which kids the papers belonged to, but I'm maths where I don't have to interpret and decide how many marks something is, the mark scheme tells me very clearly what the mark for that question is. I do think maths was a lot easier to organise than a lot of subjects, as we basically took the Nov 20 exams. Then the mark scheme is entirely accurate and we had published grade boundaries to give us a basis for our tags. Of course, we did adjust those grades boundaries, upwards, because the kids performed better in the classroom than they normally do in the hall. Our results using the original grade boundaries would have been our best results ever by 10%, which we had to reduce to be in line with our historical results.