It’s 9.00am on a September Monday. I take a sip from my routine cup of coffee - I don’t even like it; it tastes like mud. 

At staff briefing, I let the barrage of notices telling me that Jimmy has lost his coat or Sarah left her timetable in the art block wash over me, until I hear one that attracts my attention: GCSE predicted grades for Year 9 need to be in the system by Tuesday next week. 

Sonny and Cher kick in over the school’s intercom telling me that they’ve got me, babe. Then I realise: it’s Groundhog Day. 

The classrooms all look very different. Tables are neatly lined in rows, hand-sanitiser dispensers are attached to the wall just as you walk in, and there’s yellow tape all over the floor, but the fundamentals have remained the same. We are back here again: filling in databases so we all know exactly who to blame if Evie doesn’t get her grade 7 in three years’ time. 

Something - anything - to stick into the system

Because, let’s face it, that’s what the whole process is about: accountability. Nobody says it, but everyone knows it. 

Inset discussions about how lockdown had helped us re-evaluate what we do as teachers rapidly plunge into irrelevance. Conversations about how this year would be different and how the paradigm had shifted to put trust back in teachers now seem like total pie in the sky. 

Then, the panic sets in: “But how on Earth are we going to put these predicted grades in without an assessment?” 

Quickly, discussion turns to how today’s lessons are going to have to be scrapped so that teachers can force pupils through a GCSE-style question so they have something - anything - to stick into the system. 

The worst thing, though, is that I get it. I totally get the panic. If you put a predicted grade into the system, and someone comes to ask where you got the grade from, saying that you “used your professional evaluation of a child’s progress through your verbal interactions with them, observations of their work with other pupils and some of their unassessed written work” is not a good enough answer. 

Strangely, saying that they “scored 10/20 on a GCSE-style question that assesses one skill in relation to one exam of one GCSE” is, apparently, a good enough answer. Because one short test taken three weeks into a course is, clearly, an accurate predictor of what a child could get in Year 11.

No one can predict the future

If the summer showed us anything, it’s that teachers absolutely can predict grades. They can. And they can do so with some level of accuracy, in a way that is equitable and fair. 

But they can predict them at one moment in time: just when the exams would have been taking place, and having known the child and how they have engaged with learning throughout the duration of the course. 

What is ridiculous is assuming that teachers can predict a GCSE grade three years before the exam is due to be taken, based on one assessment administered after taking the course for approximately three weeks - and then holding teachers to account for the predicted grade when, in some instances, it proves too ambitious. 

If I had the genuine ability to predict the future, I would have ploughed all my money into Zoom or Tesla when they were about $50 a share, and have over a million sitting in the bank. But the truth is, I can’t. No one can.

If I have learned anything since I qualified quite some years ago, it’s that children are unpredictable. They have so many things going on in their lives. Many of these things we are aware of, but there are many other things that we are not. Any one of these things could influence how they are in school and how they approach work.

Let’s not also forget that three years is a long time. In that time, anything in a child’s life could change. Things that they viewed as constant and stable could collapse. Equally, I’ve taught huge numbers of pupils who have matured so much between Year 9 and Year 11. Those Year 9 pupils whom teachers deemed destined to struggle often knuckle down and do tremendously well in Year 11. 

By asking teachers to predict GCSE grades in Year 9, you are also asking us to factor in pastoral, behavioural and emotional changes to a child’s life and development, most of which just cannot be accounted for. It is impossible.

The only difference between this and Groundhog Day is that Bill Murray learned his lesson at the end, and everything was the better for it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the school system will.  

Paul Judge is a secondary English teacher, working in the North East of England