After a tumultuous week in education, tomorrow students will receive their GCSE results. We caught up with leaders and teachers from across further education to hear how they are feeling ahead of the big day.
Rebecca Atherfold, full-time maths tutor teaching functional skills and GCSE at the Learning and Enterprise College Bexley
Maths tutor Rebecca Atherfold tells Tes that she is confident that the grades will be a fair reflection of where students were when centre-assessed grades were set. However, she says that she is not confident that they will be the grades some students would have received if they had taken the exam.
“Our students started in September and we stopped teaching in March, so they were only three-quarters of the way through. They didn’t get a chance to finish. My concern is that if they had had the opportunity to do the exam, they would have got a higher grade,” she says.
Atherfold says that no students will be going into college to physically pick up results tomorrow - but instead will receive emails with results at 8am. Any students who are disappointed with their grades will receive phone or Zoom calls with tutors to offer support.
“We are trying to be really transparent about the process that we used to get the centre-assessed grades, because I think one of the big things this year is ownership of the results,” Atherfold adds.” This is something that students might feel has been done to them rather than they’ve done themselves, and we really want everyone to know how we arrived at those grades so people don’t feel there is any kind of injustice.
“If you’ve spent the whole year saying to students who don’t have much confidence, ‘You can do this,’ and then suddenly it could look like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you could,’ that’s not really the message we want to send to people, especially with adult learners who might have had really negative experiences of maths.”
Gill Burbridge, principal of Leyton Sixth Form College
Around 1,000 students will be receiving GCSE resit results tomorrow at Leyton Sixth Form College - 500 each for both English and maths.
Principal Gill Burbridge tells Tes that she hopes that results will be an accurate reflection of students’ abilities, but that the day could still be problematic.
“We’re hoping that will mean that more of our students will have got the qualification that they absolutely need to progress either in terms of further study with us or obviously leaving us to move on to other destinations,” she says.
“It’s still a little bit problematic because, like everybody else, we were constrained to some extent by previous performance in terms of GCSE results, so couldn’t enter calculated grades that were significantly out of kilter with those. So they’re not going to be extraordinary, groundbreaking results because our centre-assessed grades were in line with our previous performance. But hopefully they’re not the disastrous results that they might have been otherwise.”
She says that it looks like more students at Leyton Sixth Form will receive that crucial grade 4 this year - meaning they won’t have to resit the qualification again.
“From the very brief look I’ve had at them, it does look like we’ll have more students, particularly those that have tried repeatedly to get this, that may have just edged themselves over the line this time. And that’s the difference between GCSEs and A levels for us. Students who will be receiving grades from us tomorrow are absolutely about getting that grade 4 or that grade 5, depending on what it is they need in order to move on.
“For some of them, it has been several years of frustration and disappointment. I really hope that when we do look at those results in detail this afternoon, students have been treated fairly by the reversion back to the CAD grades and that they do have the grades they need.”
Students at Leyton will receive their results remotely tomorrow - and may be invited in to have a face-to-face discussions with staff if they are disappointed or have any concerns.
Grant Glendinning, executive principal at NCG
Across the NCG group, there are 2,400 16- to 18-year-olds receiving their GCSE results in maths, along with 2,300 getting results in English.
Executive principal Grant Glendinning tells Tes that he welcomes the U-turn to centre-assessed grades for GCSEs, but that NCG had already decided to use CAGs in its entry criteria.
“Internally, as colleges in our group, we were deciding that the right thing to do would be to assess young people coming in to us on their teacher grades anyway, because we’ve envisaged that this would give a fairer view of their progress for this year, but also not hinder them in any way in terms of their next step in their progress, which we really feared the moderated grades would be doing,” he said.
Mr Glendinning says that he does expect to see a rise in grade 4s: “I think that some of that will be down to improvement and step change in the way that potentially English and maths is being delivered this year, in particular. Colleges have been throwing great expertise, thought and resources at trying to make improvements in this area.
“And if there are increases in grade 4s, perhaps, yes, some of it could be due to grade creep, but equally I would hope lots of it was due to the hard work of students and colleagues in colleges that are trying to improve this.”
He adds that NCG students are being invited into college to receive their results tomorrow. Each cohort has been awarded a time slot, and college staff and leaders will be on hand to offer support and congratulations to students.
“As a group, we understand what’s happening and we’ve been following this as it’s unfolded day by day, but a lot of parents and young people haven’t and there will still be a lot of ambiguity and confusion around this for many of our students. So being able to be on hand, and speaking to people who need further information or guidance, will be critical,” he says.
Jonny Kay, head of English and maths at Tyne Coast College
At Tyne Coast College, there will be more than 850 students receiving GCSE results over two different sites. Like at NCG, students will be invited into college to pick up results.
Jonny Kay, head of English and maths, says that this is important for “normality” and to ensure that staff are on hand to support students.
Students will be coming in from 9am and will be sent to a specific area to pick up results, and then sent to one of several other locations to speak directly to teachers, Kay tells Tes. He says that social distancing will be in place and there will be hand sanitiser and masks available.
“I think it’s the right thing to do for a lot of reasons: just a sense of normality. As much as the virus has had a massive impact on everybody in every sector across the world, we do need to make sure that our students know that we’re there to support them,” he says.
“We’re following every guideline that we can. We’ve got the social distancing but I think away from that and away from the legislation, staff are really just looking forward to getting back to it, to meeting students , getting into the job and I think leaders are, too.”
He adds that he believes the results students receive will be fair because the college had used a “robust system” for calculating centre-assessed grades.
“We worked very hard on it, as everybody did. We looked at every scrap of data that we could find, we got all the evidence that we could, we had several roundtables where we sat as a department to interrogate the data, the evidence, the assessments, and we’re confident that it’s the fairest that it could have been under the circumstances,” he says.
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