When I was head of English at a comprehensive secondary school, my department and I did everything we could to meet the school’s ambitious GCSE targets. We tried streaming by attainment, having large class sizes, providing weekend rewrite opportunities for controlled assessments.
Unfortunately, these efforts didn’t always work, and each year, after Christmas, we would begin a six-month battle to “convert” the students who underperformed in their mocks and help them to meet their target grades.
This was the situation twenty years ago - and I don’t think much has changed today. The struggle to turn around those students still continues in schools across the country.
So what can heads of department do about it?
Well, for me, everything changed when I was introduced to a very straightforward, yet incredibly effective, approach. The results were immediate and impressive. In previous years, attainment increased only slightly based on interventions run in terms two and three of Year 11. But thanks to the new approach, we saw pass rates increase by more than 10 per cent.
Increasing GCSE pass rates: how it works in my school
How did it work? The first step is to create a question level analysis (QLA) for your mock results. This looks at the raw mark students got on each question and compares it to the mark needed to pass. By analysing their areas for improvement on any given paper, you can run intervention sessions based on performance in individual questions, topics or units. Then you reassess and repeat.
Today, I’m a deputy headteacher in a very different setting. But I’ve taken this simple model and developed it into a whole-school approach. As a result, I’ve seen an annual average increase of 15 to 20 per cent in student attainment between Year 11 mock exams and their final results across the full suite of GCSE subjects.
It’s not a perfect science and you will certainly think of things that could be done differently for your own context. But here’s how it works for us.
Start early
It’s too late to act on this for 2022 results, but I’d recommend mock exams begin in mid-November and last for two weeks. This will give you enough time to mark, create QLAs, provide student feedback, meet with parents to share feedback, and include the data in the end of term one report. It’s ambitious, but it is possible.
Be accurate
You need to have confidence in the data that you are using to inform decisions that affect student outcomes. Ensure the following:
- All students sit the same set of exam papers from the most recent set of external exams.
- All teachers use the same set of grade boundaries from the most recent set of external exams.
- All teachers moderate both internally and externally.
- All teachers submit a QLA to a leader that is cross-referenced against a selection of papers to ensure consistency of marking.
Get clarity
Once papers are completed and marked, work to produce the clearest and simplest overview of student attainment across the school. Build a central spreadsheet where student names are put in column A, followed by the subjects across the other columns and grades in the matrix, so you get an entire overview of a child’s performance.
This should read like the subject level QLA, and shows you the intervention needed by subject across the school. At our school, subject leaders submit the moderated grades and it is compiled and quality assured by the leadership team for analysis.
Work together
Once the data has been presented clearly and concisely, work with your subject and pastoral leaders to review the academic needs of each student and decide what intervention should be put in place.
For example, if a student is secure in science and English, but not performing well in maths, they need to be given a range of opportunities to develop in maths as a priority.
There is no hiding from the fact that this is time-consuming. In our school, we have a tradition of a pizza evening where middle leaders stay after school and eat together to provide time for the process.
Each child’s report is printed and they are divided up into groups. To give you an idea of numbers, if you have a cohort of 200 students and 20 middle leaders, you can ask 10 professional pairs to review 20 reports each.
Questions that need to be considered will depend on your context and cohort, here are a few to give you a flavour:
- Are the students’ pathways correct? Should they be moved into foundation maths, or stay with the higher paper, for example? In science, are they doing single, double, triple, foundation, higher? In English, are they on the right track for literature, language or English for speakers of other languages (Esol)?
- Would the student benefit from an early entry or taking an additional qualification?
- Does the student need to take all of their option subjects to meet Progress and Attainment 8 measures?
- Can extra time be given within the timetable for the student to focus on a particular subject?
- Is there one subject that the student needs support in?
The subject-specific QLAs drive individual courses, but here, you are providing the framework to ensure the right subjects get the right amount of time and support with the right students.
Provide mentors
The individualised intervention plans should be in place as early in the second term as possible. This is quite a feat for any school and will involve timetabling changes and the scheduling of extra sessions.
We also assign each student requiring intervention with a mentor for additional support. The mentors do not work to review academic content but ensure that the students know exactly what they should be doing to focus on their specific needs. As a general guide, in our school, each secondary teacher mentors one student from Year 11.
Repeat at subject level
Once staff and students know exactly what they need to be doing and when, hold meetings with your middle leaders to discuss how they will support each individual child in their subject area. Questions could include:
- Which children need stretching?
- What trends in component, assessment objective or exam question can you spot?
- Which classes are under- or over-performing?
- Is it time to swap teachers or students?
- What resources are available?
Jeremy Newton is the deputy headteacher at King’s College School, The British School of Madrid
