Abingdon News No.55

www.abingdon.org.uk 9 Abingdon News Abingdon’s move to being a fully online venture was remarkably swift and, as some parents said to us, seemingly achieved with the wave of a magic wand over one weekend. Of course, like the magician’s trick, there was a tremendous amount of preparatory work, which started for us back when the idea of school closure was still being loudly pooh-poohed by some. And there should be no underestimation of the amount of additional work and energy it has taken to sustain the quality of provision over the whole of the summer term. But it is a sign of the quality of Abingdon’s teaching staff that the feedback from parents and students has been so strongly positive and, like the crowd cheering at the side of a race, the effect of that support on the morale of staff has been tangible and very gratefully received. However, just doing the teaching, tutoring and what Other Half it was feasible to undertake, has been only part of the story this term. Because there was the little matter of deciding every GCSE, A Level and Pre-U grade for each of our students... I’ve been in teaching long enough to remember the several pros and cons of Centre Assessed Grades (CAGs) because, when I started teaching, English GCSE grades were awarded entirely on coursework performance. So, it was with some awareness of the problems and pitfalls that Abingdon has just undertaken the process, at relatively short notice, of submitting all grades at all levels on effectively the same basis as we used to award English. Technically, of course, we haven’t ‘awarded’ the grades - only exam boards can do that - and our CAGs are currently undergoing a statistical process with the boards who may make different decisions as to where to draw grade boundaries. What the boards won’t do, however, is alter the rank order that we have given them and it was therefore the issue of ranking that took up the bulk of the time that Heads of Department spent on this process over the first half of the summer term. Fortunately, we had two robust pieces of data from which to begin the process, as both 5th and U6th groups did a summer exam last year and then mock exams this year. Using those results gave us as good a starting point as anything, though they were far from being the end of the story. We then added into the recipe the reliable data we also had for each subject. That included such things as marks for coursework where that had been completed, the actual GCSE orals for MFL subjects, other cohort-wide testing that may have happened outside of formal internal exams, in-class testing conducted by class teachers and, where it could be reliably gathered, data from work done during the first weeks of the summer term. Having spent 90% of the time working on the rank order, we then applied to the current cohorts the historical grades profile for each subject to suggest where to draw grade boundaries. It was a painstaking process that involved, if you were to total up all the individual hours spent on it by teachers and Heads of Department, several hundred hours of work - work that we would usually have been handing over to the exam boards to do. Writing now that we have submitted what adds up to nearly 2,400 individual ‘results’ to the exam boards, I can say how immensely proud I am of Abingdon’s teachers, and particularly Heads of Department, for the way they rose to the occasion and put the work in to try to make our submission as robust and fair as it could be. It’s not necessarily something I’d ideally be wanting to do again, but I do feel very strongly that our detailed knowledge and experience was applied from a sound foundation in evidence and data to produce a fair and secure submission to the exam boards. I have no doubt that some students will feel they could/ would have done better than the grades they receive in August and that some will feel they have benefitted from their results being decided this way. We know that’s inevitable but it’s no different from the way each ‘normal’ August some students have always felt that they were not well served by the exam system and some surprise themselves (and us!) by how far they’ve apparently leapt between the end of formal teaching and the actual exams. We stand ready now to see what the exam boards do with our suggested gradings and, like everyone else, we have to wait until August to know that outcome. At least, for anyone who feels dissatisfied with grades that this system produces for them, there should be an opportunity to ‘prove them wrong’ in the autumn. Further details on how predicted grades were evaluated can be found here . The COVID results - GCSE and A Levels 2020 by Graeme May, Deputy Head Academic