From the study

It’s getting ever harder to analyse GCSE results as the key measures depend on the results from other schools, reports Ian Rimmer. But broadly speaking things are on the up.

CAST your mind back three years to the heady days when nobody except a small number of scientists had heard of coronavirus. A time when a late AugustThursday morning saw flocks of anxious young adults gathering outside school front doors, nervously awaiting confirmation or otherwise of the success of their 5-year secondary school endeavours.

Having had service suspended for a couple of years, many schools were anticipating getting back to their old ways. Unfortunately, owing to further building work at King James’s over the summer, we were unable to do that this year, falling back once again on electronic means of communicating the news.This often happens at post-16 level and may well become the norm for 11-16 schools in future, as the world increasingly relies on remote communication meth ods.

This was my 30th such results day, and they don’t get any easier. The interruptions to the GCSE course, which led to exam boards giving some prior notification of likely topics to the students, made this stranger than ever. And then we also knew the much-pub licised higher performance of the last couple of years, owing to the enforced implementation of teacher-assessed grades, would be pegged back approximately half-way to 2019 standards, when GCSE exams were last taken; the remainder of that recalibration will take place next year.

But don’t be lured into thinking the students this year had it easy. Quite the contrary; they have had significant interruptions to their studies, as well as their emotional well-being in their formative years, the like of which I and most readers will never have witnessed in the slightest. As such, they fully deserve a little ‘help’.

Given the return to semi-normality, you may be expecting my usual summary of how well King James’s School did this year. Well, sadly, that may have to wait for a later edition, for the key measures by which a school is judged nowadays depend entirely on results from other schools.We are now in the era of relative performance in a ‘zero-sum’ game. If one school does better than another, then the latter’s performance, no matter how well they have actually done, will be recorded (and rather unhelpfully reported), as a ‘below average’. Schools can’t all be good nowadays. Even if every school outperformed national expectations, a proportion would still be graded

‘Well below average’ and another set ‘Below average’. I have yet to fathom how such a system can be good for morale in an industry which often struggles to recruit.

For what it is worth, I can offer you the latest projections (based on one company’s own data) about how our figures look in the end.

The percentages for 2017-22, in so far as you can compare for all the reasons stated above, are listed in Table 1.‘Progress 8’ results (a headline indicator of school performance) are shown om Table 2 overleaf. Some areas are performing more strongly than others but, broadly speaking, things are on the up; and long may that continue!

School Performance Measures (%)

2017 - 2022

So, what of the further building work to which I alluded earlier. “I thought that was all over”, I hear you call. One final element of the expansion project had to be postponed owing to delays to the new block and the running of GCSE exams; the PE changing rooms. A larger student population requires more changing room space, so they are being extended and upgraded; a move that will benefit not only students, but also OAS sporting groups that utilise school facilities. Meanwhile we have also been successful with two Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) bids; it is fairly unusual to be successful with one, but to win two bids is a unique event. Our outdated heating system gets a well-overdue upgrade and some of the external fabric, which is now bearing the scars of time, gets replaced.

With more work comes more disruption though, a state to which we have become rather too accustomed over recent years. I look forward to normality, whatever that is! n