1. How will we create your child's centre assessed grade?

What have we been told to do by the Government and OfQual?

Your child's grade will be based on a range of evidence. We are told that this evidence can be mock examinations, classwork and homework.

Guidance from OfQual states that the evidence that is used to form your child's grade:

• Should be based on evidence, only on what content has been delivered to them by their teachers, whether in lesson or through remote learning during lockdown.
• Should be based on assessment from throughout the course.
• Should use a broad range of evidence across the taught content.
• Should be objective and fair.

The guidance also states that the work used for assessment should be based around assessments similar to those used by the examination boards, such as past questions or essay style tasks. It also states that records of a student performance in practical subjects or coursework can be used, regardless of what point during the course they were created.

How will we implement this?

We want to ensure that your child is awarded the grade they are consistently working at, and to make sure that they are not disadvantaged as a consequence of the Covid-19 situation. 

We have asked our Heads of Department to identify up to five pieces of work for each GCSE subject that all students doing the course have had an opportunity to complete. To ensure that the examination boards will consider the work as robust, each piece of work will be linked in some way to assessments similar to those used by examination boards. This we have called our 'Prior Evidence'.

However, we recognise that students will have made progress, and so it is important that your child has a chance to demonstrate this. To allow this, we will also set a number of assessments between April 19th May and Wednesday 21st May. 

These assessments will happen during your child's lesson and will be around 40 minutes in length. We have published the dates, times and what the assessment will test on this website. These pages will also include links to materials that will help you support your child with the revision.

If your child has access arrangements already agreed with the JCQ, we will ensure that they will have the support appropriate to the agreed access arrangement. Your child will be asked to complete their assessment in a different room to their normal assessment. They will be reminded in school, but the majority of their assessments are likely to be sat in room C9.

Students should receive feedback at the end of each assessment which may include verbal feedback or percentages. They will not be told a grade for the work, as all assessments will have to go a moderation process to ensure the marking is consistent and fair for all students.

How will you form the grade?

Our Heads of Departments will carefully select around 5-8 pieces of data to form an evidence base. Two or three of these will be assessments still to be conducted after Easter, and will allow students to demonstrate progress. The remainder will be based around assessments conducted during Years 11, 10 and possibly Year 9.

Teams will then look at the teacher assessment given at Christmas in the Autumn 2 report, and identify if the evidence base supports this assessment. If it does, this is likely to be the students Centre Assessed Grade.

We will then look to see if the evidence supports a higher grade than the Christmas Autumn 2 assessment. If it does, we may raise the Centre Assessed Grade.

However, if the evidence does not support the report grade, this may lead to a Centre Assessed Grade that is below the grade reported at Christmas in the  Autumn 2 report. Please remember that the Autumn 2 grades were made before we were informed the Examinations were cancelled, and teachers may give grades higher than the evidence supports to give the student confidence in preparation for the exams.

Will you inform me of the grades used as part of the prior evidence?

We are looking to identify an evidence base that supports the attainment of our students. This is a large, time consuming job and may change over May and June as we review the data. For this reason, we will not release the prior data grades before the 18th June 2021. However, your child will be informed of the percentages or marks they have attained in the assessments they conduct.

We can assure you that we will make sure your child is awarded the grade they have demonstrated they can attain.

The best thing that your child can do now is to help us form the best evidence base we can, by revising for the assessments coming up after Easter and getting the best grade they can in each assessment!