Something fishy?
Something fishy?
Something fishy?
Schools receive their examination results the day before they are issued to students. This gives us time to plan results day, to see which students may have missed out on college places, and to draft the information we give to the press.
This year is no different.
And yet this year is different, because from 10 am yesterday I started to get messages from fellow headteachers across England to say that their English results were 10% or more below what they expected. They were asking whether I knew anything about problems with the marking.
I didn’t.
But when I saw our results, the same was true - English results more than 10% below where we would expect them, and yet the same experienced team (including me) had been teaching GCSE English, with a series of tests, checks and mock exams through the year to monitor students’ progress - and all this in the same school that last week had achieved some of the best A-level results in the County.
If, as it seems from Twitter’s hyperactivity last night, this is an issue across schools in England, then today is going to raise some big questions about why results seem to have changed so dramatically in a core subject.
Its significance is considerable because of the way schools are measured in performance tables. A 10% or more drop in English thereby reduces the school’s overall performance by a similar degree. It also means that students who this time last year might have got, say, a grade C could this time be awarded a D.
In other words any change of grade boundaries affects schools and, most significantly, affects students and possibly their progression to college or the sixth form.
Lots of us who have been working in schools and teaching English for a long time (28 years in my case) will be surprised if the drop in the English pass-rate is as widespread and deep as it seems. We’ll be wondering how it can have happened. We’ll be looking at whether grade boundaries in English have shifted between January exams and June, and asking how that can be and why and who decided it.
Many parents, especially if their child has missed out on a target grade, will be wondering the same thing - is it an accident, a fluke, or a deliberate policy?
Who knows?
All I know is that some distraught headteachers were phoning me yesterday fearing their jobs are on the line because of their school’s apparently disastrous and unexplained drop in school rankings.
It looks from here as if we have a challenging and possibly dispiriting day ahead, and certainly some big questions emerging about GCSE marking.
Geoff Barton
Thursday 23 August, 2012
5:54 am
Thursday, 23 August 2012