Previous teacher has grossly overinflated progress... has anyone ever worked through this?

[canadienne]

I feel so angry and so misled. My colleague is a lovely woman, very popular and spends a good bit of time telling everyone how wonderful her current class are...

SLT are verbally supportive but I feel like nothing is being done.

What year group?

Y1. She had just under 80% at GLD. I'm not overly familiar with EYFS so while I thought this was a bit off initially, it's taken me a while to wade through it all.

I have no real advice but I’m in a similar situation with one of my classes. It’s caused huge issues with parents and students questioning why I haven’t moved their levels up so I can sympathise. I have been photocopying evidence to justify my judgements. In my case it’s not the entire class, the first teacher in question was a student teacher in my class who due to covid only had a few weeks of teaching practice before qualifying. She only stayed at the school for 2 terms and was obviously struggling with levels so it appears that they were all put on the same level. The second teacher was an NQT who was obviously told just to ‘bump them up a few sub levels’ Now I’m picking up the pieces! I also have a paper trail of a list of the students who I don’t think are the levels stated (seeing as they can’t move backwards) so that I can’t be blamed if these students end up in a top GCSE set. Cover yourself!

Yup been there. Took on a Y11 class who had refused to engage with my colleague's online Y10 teaching throughout lockdown. She was super quiet about this and predicted the whole class grade 7's. They couldn't factorise a basic quadratic. I spent the whole year with them eyerolling and sulking that I was not as 'motivating' as her, and telling their parents I was shit. She got promoted. Was far better at buttering up SLT than she was at predicting grades, it seems....

I can't begin to understand what it's like in exam years- and as for the one who got promoted. I'd like to say I'm shocked, but sadly not.

It's just put so much stress on throughout the year.

We do half termly data which is good for this because I find it helpful to get in early with evidence saying "this is where I believe X to be now" even if this shows a big drop initially.
Also push for some moderation sessions so you have shared evidence of what meeting targets looks like.

@DrHousecuredme So do we but the issue is that we can only keep them on the same level or move them up which is frustrating. I’ve had to keep 3 students on a level 6 since September despite them being about a level 4 in reality. Looking at the data makes it look as if they’ve made no progress in my class.
@RBKB I’m getting the eye rolling too plus a very poor attitude towards me in general. It’s got to the point where I’m counting down the lessons I have left with this particular class!

There are a few things to consider here.

First, the EYFS framework is still massively disconnected from the national curriculum at Y1. It is very possible to reach GLD and not actually be ready for Y1 from an academic or emotional/behavioural standpoint. It's one of the reasons why demonstrating strong progress in Y1 is difficult. It may be that her judgements are accurate but she is obviously assessing against a completely different set of criteria. Generally speaking, 80% GLD is very possible but obviously it depends on the cohort and context of the school.

However, if it is genuinely the case that her judgements are wrong then that's an SLT issue. There should be regular opportunities for SLT and/or subject leads to moderate her judgements. She should have evidence to support where she says the children are and if her judgements are found to be inaccurate, she should be getting support with this.

I would say that there is always a small touch of over-inflation in any system that's purely teacher judgement. That's been proven time and time again and most teachers see that when receiving their new classes. The issue is when it's a significant proportion of the class or the judgements are wildly wrong.

Completely agree with Iamnothe1.

I used to love teaching Y1, but during the past few years it has got harder as pressure to show 'progress' gets more intense. I work closely with the EYFS teacher and SLT. They all understand that the two systems of assessment, data gathering and levels are very different beasts and are two separate curriculums that don't dovetail. They are very clear that they don't want me to inflate data, as that would start an unfair and distorted data progression for the rest of the school, right at the beginning. But it means that my class data always looks awful, especially in the first couple of terms, and I'm always in 'catch-up' mode.

It feels like Y1 is being beaten with two sticks - 'lack' of progress from EYFS data, and then expectations of NC with subject leaders, driven by Ofsted expectations, wanting to see the same sort of retrieval practice, knowledge retention and assessment that happens in the rest of the school, but which is often developmentally inappropriate for the 5 year olds in Y1.

I am lucky to work in a school that listens to me when I argue against certain practices for Y1, and how difficult it is to show progress in the data, but it still feels pressurised in a way that I don't enjoy. It's such a shame as Y1 is a wonderful year group to teach.

Yes. I have felt permanently in catch up to these results, especially as I have less TA support (only 3 days). I’ve had to be a lot firmer and although we have elements of play, what we’re doing is really far too structured to be called continuous provision. I’m pulling too many from their free choice time just to try and catch them up.

The biggest issues have been reading and writing. Only 5 were capable of reading or writing even one short sentence like ‘The cat is big’ in September. The rest just couldn’t.

We do moderate, but looking at my class’ July assessments, they must have been very heavily coached. I think we need to look
at moderating a lesson rather than the work, if that makes sense. I don’t think that would go down well and I’m not SLT.

It very much depends on your school demographic too. It's easy if you work in a bubble to think those lovely children just nudging expected on a good day are much better than that because they are your higher level learners. I've seen it in secondary (as a teacher and moderating GCSE) and primary.