Public Exam Briefing for parents
Tuesday 2 March 2021
Mr Steve Richards,
Mrs Steph Rogers,
Mr James Wilding
Education secretary Gavin Williamson said:
“Young people have shown incredible resilience over the last year, continuing with their learning amidst unprecedented challenges while the country battles with this pandemic. Those efforts deserve to be fairly rewarded.
Our duty of candour
Summary of decisions by Ofqual, on how grades for GCSEs, AS and A levels should be determined in summer 2021, to which schools must abide.
Item | Decision |
1 | Teachers must assess their students’ performance, only on what content has been delivered to them by their teachers, to determine the grade each student should receive. |
2 | Teachers can use evidence of a student’s performance from throughout the course to inform their judgement. |
3 | Schools and colleges should use a broad range of evidence across the taught content to determine the grades before submitting the grades to the exam boards. |
4 | Teachers should determine the grades as late in the academic year as is practicable, and not confined to a defined window, to enable teaching to continue for as long as possible. |
5 | Heads of centres will have to confirm that students have been taught sufficient content to allow progression to the next stage of their education, although we will not set requirements about the minimum amount of content that students must have been taught. |
6 | Students should continue to work on their non-exam assessment (NEA), including for Project qualifications. NEA will be marked by teachers and will contribute to the overall grade, whether or not is has been completed, but we will not require exam boards to moderate it. |
7 | In GCSE, AS and A level art and design, the student’s grade must be based on the portfolio1 only, whether or not it has been completed. |
8 | In GCSE English language, GCSE modern foreign languages and A level sciences (biology, chemistry, physics and geology), centres should determine and submit a separate grade or result for the endorsement. This result or grade should be based on work that has been completed towards the endorsement. |
9 | Private candidates should work with a centre to provide evidence in line with the sort of evidence that other students will produce. |
10 | Overall, it will be no easier or harder for a student to achieve a particular grade this year compared to previous years.� |
Quality assurance around Grades awarded.
Nationally, every student is given a Unique Candidate Identifier number. This enables comparison of data across centre, exam boards and from one year to the next.
In addition, as part of a national data gathering exercise, schools participate with a very narrow range of suppliers to provide benchmarking base-line information on their students.
These baseline assessments give rise to predictions of potential future achievements against baseline prediction, and Claires Court’s historic performance over the last 25 continues to confirm we perform in the top 5% of institutions.
Other thoughts arising from our Academic paper?
Parents & Student consultation
How best to add to the programme in June and July?
Year 11 - T101s plus other Careers work and opportunities
Year 13 - U101s plus other Careers work and opportunities
Public Exam Briefing for parents
Tuesday 2021
Mr Steve Richards,
Mrs Steph Rogers,
Mr James Wilding