I’m sure everyone will agree: teacher-assessed grades were not enjoyable for everyone involved. But now that A-level results day is behind us, I have begun to reflect on the process, and actually, I believe there is a lot we can learn from it.

Going forward, I’ll be taking the following three lessons from the 2021 assessment series into the next academic year. 

Audit your curriculum

For key stage 3 teachers, curriculum audits won’t be new: but when was the last time we put KS4 under the microscope? This year’s TAGs process saw teachers fully immerse themselves into KS4 provision, and therefore, at our school, led to an audit of the curriculum. As a result, we have decided to:

Alter the sequence of lessons within units

This year, we’ve been able to see a whole cohort’s end assessments in full, rather than a few requested example scripts, and therefore have been able to see how all our students categorise, associate and apply their knowledge to questions. We were surprised to see stark contrasts between in class perceptions versus end performance output.

Going forward, we will introduce mini-themes within unit sub-components to support students with knowledge retention. Based on our thorough look at the exam answers, this introduction should lead to students retrieving and applying knowledge appropriately when they see key exam wording.

Adapt the order of units

Based on student progress, we had always saved our shortest unit until last in Year 11. However, when we looked at end performance, it was obvious that this strategy wasn’t translating into guaranteed marks. Therefore, we have decided to bring this unit to the forefront of Year 11, to ensure sufficient time is given to embedding the knowledge it covers and giving us an opportunity to interleave exam questions for it over an entire year.

GCSEs and A levels 2021: A guide to appealing grades

Tes magazine: Teachers relive their experiences of TAGs

GCSE results day 2021: How to handle TAG unhappiness

Organise CPD

Using elements from the Ofsted Research Review series, I plan to dedicate part of this year’s CPD programme to ensuring all staff understand the rationale behind the KS4 curriculum, including core knowledge teaching and where the specification enables teachers to develop concepts. 

Staff should then be in a better position to make “micro-choices” and add their own details around certain aspects they are particularly knowledgeable in or know would be suitable for their class. 

Prompted by our discussions on the Teacher Support Material mark schemes, I plan to organise unit-specific CPD, prioritising staff suggestions and using unit-by-unit data analysis to track our areas of development. This will mean centralised resources are updated, and also enable pupils to develop a depth of knowledge in major and minor elements of the specification.

Embrace moderation

This academic year, my school allocated time after the December assessment period for departments to moderate Year 11. We repeated this process again after the TAG evidence exams were sat.

Of course, moderation for coursework and mock exams is common for GCSE and A-level groups, but why do we typically restrict this process to exam years or for the most important assessments?

This process was greatly beneficial and I will now ensure this happens for every assessment point moving forward. Yes, it takes time, but spending the time moderating upfront before marking the whole class ensured we could mark more accurately afterwards and when we compared our rationales, the discussions were hugely valuable for everyone’s CPD.

I know some schools are moving towards comparative judgement at KS3 for extended answers and other schools may already moderate at KS3, but my department currently does not.

Once my department has a regular routine and diet of moderation expectations at KS4, then the next step would be to expand it to our KS3 cohorts and continue to improve our marking and evaluation of student performance. 

Tessa McLaughlin is the head of history at Bedford Academy.