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

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The mix up with her dd’s exam results is awful! But can you imagine the conversation? Lower grades sent in error to the exam board have cost a pupil their place…….it’s the Gove/Vine household……..

MrsAd I agree re maths. The data from both GCSE and A Level shows maths to be one of the least 'inflated' subjects and I think that is down to the nature of marking the papers, and (not sure I can really say this) but a good understanding of prior data and how statistics work. Also surprise surprise, bigger entry subjects generally were less 'inflated'.

Actually, I also marked 108 GCSE lit scripts. Someone else moderated those.
And 12 A level lit scripts.

We used November 20 and November 19 and were told by SLT to use the November 20 boundaries!!!

Then we had to change that to make them realistic.

The plan was always to blame schools and teachers, after last year’s debacle. Gavin was kept in place as a fall back/deflection. Vine’s piece was probably 90% written months ago.

Re the Sarah Vine article
A) wring results being sent to an exam board don’t prove that teachers make mistakes (and therefore are capable of bias, which seems a weird line of logic anyway), that’s surely an exams office error!

B) the charts halfway through contain these categories: SecMod, SecComp and SecSel. Secondary Moderns don’t exist any more, what does she (/ whoever made those charts) mean??

Do some areas that have grammar schools also have secondary moderns? I mean, we only have one grammar school relatively near us, so most schools are comprehensive.

Yeah, did so much extra for free for both A Level and GCSE and the extra criticism from ignorant journalists/members of public obvs it was unreal. Weeks and weeks of extra work/training/stress.

I think my biggest gripe with the exam boards taking all our money though, was that they not only couldn’t be bothered to produce new assessment material as they heavily implied they would, they also waited until the Easter holidays to let us know that
A) there was nothing new-only what we had already or had already given to pupils
B) they were going to publish the only papers still under ‘lock and key’ for free, to all pupils to have full access to.

Really annoys me that the exam boards are really getting away with justified criticism and letting exams officers and teachers be in the firing line.

I think the exam boards had their hand forced on the locked paper thing. Didn't ofqual say they had to release them so as not to disadvantage poorer students because the papers were "out there" online for a fee?

The lack of new material was terrible, especially as that was implied throughout. I think they realised how much work it would be so didn't/couldn't do it. Don't normal exams take 2-3 years in the writing?

Sounds like the daughter was borderline or moderated up /down. Strange it only affected one child.

Tbh it's pretty shocking even the pre pandemic school differences. However obviously grammar and some private schools are selective.

In some ways for dc1 i think the option of trying for grammar would be good.
We have a 'choice' of a requires improvement secondary. And are 1 street away from being able to get the good (in or our about 50/50. Which we would have been able to get before they built a whole extra estate of houses.
Dc1 is quite bright and might have got into a grammar.
Also though this doesnt really affect dc1 the split through the school between secondary destinations must affect friendships.

I teach in a grammar but I’ve taught brighter “comp kids” reasons being:

1. it’s an all girls’ school so automatically we are pooling from 50% of the area
2. We are selecting from the ‘best’ of a deprived area
3. girls are tutored to pass the 11+

I enjoy teaching there. I don’t deal with the behaviour problems I did when I taught in comps (although we are taking more SEN pupils and PP pupils and we haven’t got the support systems in place) but it’s very different to what I thought it would be!

Yes, there are some grammars near to my county. The single set grammars don't even take all.the brightest children as parents and children do self-select away from single secondary schools, so the comps are comps, not secondary moderns in those towns. The co-ed grammars do tend to take more of the top as parents are happier with mixed sex schools and so the "other" schools in towns are secondary moderns and some do still call themselves that.

Single sex that should say twice in the one sentence. Bloody autocorrect.

If it is only a little bit of their money, then the exam boards should be happy to release it! I hope that’s it now and any extra work is paid.

I can’t imagine how awful it would be to mess up anything to do with the education of a Vine/Gove offspring. Poor school.

Exam boards have given percentage refunds this year, I think Pearson was 33%, OCR 42% and AQA 26%.

Sec/mod is probably high schools in places like Kent where 25% of the cohort attends grammars.

I really don't know how AQA can justify their paltry refund. They were rubbish! I am going to refuse to examine for them ever again.

Regarding the pay, £5 a script sounds about right (although AQA is set up for my subject so that you have to mark by question, so £1 per essay ish). Of course that's before tax. Last time I examined (2019), I was also required to do separate, compulsory child protection and e-safety courses as well as training, and of course the qualification scripts. The training was on one software package and the actual marking on another. Nothing is paid for pre-qualification, so it's really a lot of unpaid work till you get to the £1 an essay. Which is taxable income of course.

Many moons ago I marked for IB and that paid about 25% more, although there was a bit of an exchange rate risk as they paid in $. They were quite nice to their examiners too and communicated clearly. AQA speak a weird, pseudo-English.

We are in a grammar area and the non-grammars schools don’t call themselves secondary moderns but I guess they sort of are.

The other possibility is the Mail think there are still secondary moderns! It would explain a lot of their other articles .

I looked again at the DM article and realised the source of the graphs is Ofsted! There is no report listed on Ofsted’s website, but the graphs appear again here:
www.tes.com/news/gcse-and-level-results-2021-what-did-teachers-learn

I see we’re still pretending Grey Coats is a typical state comprehensive, so we can say we sent our children to state schools then.

The problem with her A-level results is awful, but it’s not really anything to do with the rest of what Vine’s talking about in that article and I suspect the school in question is much more in line with independent sector results than other state results.

@MsAwesomeDragon

Do some areas that have grammar schools also have secondary moderns? I mean, we only have one grammar school relatively near us, so most schools are comprehensive.

By definition a High School in a grammar area is a “secondary modern”, though the term became “restricted range comprehensive” for a while in the 90s and performance was compared like for like by Ofsted - I know, because I taught in such a school and we were in the top 2% of such. We had three grammar schools in the area, a boys’, a girls’ and a co-ed, so we lost a lot of brighter pupils. Our top sets did very well though, because there were a sufficient number of middle class parents who objected to the grammar system to not put their kids in for the 11+. We had lots of teachers’ kids - there were five or six in my son’s year and four or five in my daughter’s.

www.gch.org.uk/about-us/examination-results here are Grey Coat's results.

By definition a High School in a grammar area is a “secondary modern”

That’s interesting-all of our grammars have ‘High’ school in their names!

Yes, the nomenclature is confusing. Some independents are called Grammar schools, adding to the confusion.
By High School, I mean the non-selective in a selective area.