Year 11 Exams Update - 02/03/2021

Dear Students and Parents/Carers,

First, I hope you are staying safe and keeping well. As you will no doubt have seen on the news this week, the government has announced arrangements for providing Y11 students with qualification grades this year.

The main points of the announcement from your point of view at this point are:

• The school 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.

• The school can use evidence of a student’s performance from throughout the course to inform their judgement.

• The school 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.

• 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.

• Schools must submit their results by 18th June

We will be asking heads of subjects to identify the work they wish students to be assessed against, and making this information available to students for each of their subjects.

Between their return to school and the Easter holiday, we will be asking class teachers to carry out revision of topics on their list.

The government and exam boards will be providing materials to allow fair assessment of students to be carried out and used alongside other evidence (classwork, coursework etc.) in order to reach judgements about final grades.

After Easter there are seven weeks of school before the half-term holiday. During this time, we expect that most subjects will be following a revise/test cycle that will repeat to cover the topics outlined. We hope to offer sessions during the Easter and Half Term holidays as well as continuing extended day sessions.

It is therefore vital that students attend school and complete work in order to have as much evidence as possible compiled so teachers can provide their suggested grades.

Please note: this is the start of the grading process. Grades submitted by teachers will be scrutinised by Heads of Department, Senior Subject links and the Headteacher to ensure consistency of judgements within individual subjects and across the school as a whole. The Grades that students receive (probably around August 12th) will therefore be Centre Assessed Grades not the incorrectly used Teacher Assessed grades. The full procedure we use for standardising, moderating and awarding grades will be published once we have final guidance from OFQUAL and the Department of Education.

Students will be able to appeal grades. In the first instance this will involve a clerical check to ensure that the grade provided to the exam board matches the grade the school intended to submit. Further to this, there will be checks that the school has followed its own procedure in allocating grades to students. Under no circumstances should class teachers be approached by students or parents/carers before or after the results have been awarded to enquire about a student’s individual grade. More details about this process will be issued on results day.

As yet, we do not have specific details about the materials to be provided or exactly how each subject will apply them. We will, of course, keep you updated with information as we have it.

We hope this news at least provides some certainty about what the next few weeks and months look like. Please, if you have any questions contact me on my email address and I will do my best to answer.

Stay safe,

Best regards

Simon Woods

Assistant Headteacher