A-Level examination sittings, which stretch from mid-May through to the end of June, often overlap with an international football tournament. Unfortunately, football lovers, who are more likely to be boys than girls, can find this a distraction from their revision schedule. Economists at the University of Bristol have noticed how this has damaged English boys [...]
Overall, A-Level pass rates have stayed broadly the same A*-A rates were down marginally from 25.9 per cent to 25.8 per cent of all entries. A*-C rates increased slightly from 77.3 per cent to 77.6 per cent, while A*-E rates stayed unchanged, with 98.1 of all entrants achieving a pass. A-Level entry numbers are down [...]
Today, Sutton Trust published our report on the 300 secondary schools who transformed their curriculum between 2010 and 2013 in response to government policy, achieving a rise in the proportion of pupils entering the EBacc from 8% to 48%. Understanding the experiences of pupils in these schools gives us a little window on what might [...]
Earlier today at the Festival of Education I hosted a panel session with Jack Marwood and Michael Tidd that asked whether high stakes primary school tests can ever serve the interests of children. Michael Tidd has, through his blogs, tweets and newspaper column, publicly held the Government to account through the repeated missed deadlines on [...]
At our NPD training course last month we discussed the problem of what to do when a test is not universally sat by every pupil in every year. One good example is the Key Stage Two maths extension paper, sat by some 11 year olds in the years up to 2002 and then between 2012 and [...]
Ofqual last week wrote to awarding organisations (AOs), asking them to justify the size, and guided learning hours, of qualifications of theirs which count in Key Stage 4 performance tables. The regulator may wish to go further and consider also how grades in non-GCSE qualifications relate to GCSE grades. GCSE grades awarded by different AOs [...]
We were commissioned by Ofqual to consider the likely impact on different types of schools of different approaches to the award of grade 9 in new GCSEs. Three approaches to the award of grade 9 were modelled: 20% approach: the grade 9 boundary in each subject is set so that the top 20% of students [...]
This year, 81 schools are using the new Proof of Progress Tests (PoP tests) from FFT to assess writing and conceptual understanding in maths at the start and end of Year 7. The tests are designed to be sensitive to learning, but resistant to practice effects. In other words, we would only expect pupils [...]
Answer? Law and astronomy, although there are very few entries each year. The much bigger issue is that GCSEs in modern foreign languages are graded more severely than other subjects. Just before Christmas, Ofqual published a set of very interesting working papers about inter-subject comparability and subject difficulty in GCSEs and A levels. The conclusion [...]
