More schools set 
to miss targets 
on key GCSEs

Secondary school league tables will be published tomorrow showing how more than half a million pupils fared in their
GCSEs and A-levels last summer.

Ministers have raised the minimum floor target, meaning schools will now be classed as falling short if they do not get at least 40 per cent of pupils to achieve five A* to C GCSE passes including English and maths. This is up from 35 per cent on 2011. Twenty six schools fell below the floor target last year.

However the new figures for 2012 are being published while campaigners are still trying to get thousands of English papers remarked following a legal battle with two exam boards and the regulator Ofqual.

A leading head teachers’ union and an education boss in Yorkshire have said it is unfair to measure schools on GCSE results which have been challenged in the courts.

A national campaign, involving 11 Yorkshire councils and more than 20 secondary schools, were granted a court hearing after challenging the way in which grade boundaries were moved in GCSE English, meaning the same standard of work could get different grades depending on when it was marked. Campaigners claim that exam boards made it more difficult to get a C grade in the summer after concerns that too many students had been awarded the grade with controlled assessment work that had been done at the beginning of the year.

The alliance claimed that exam boards shifting the grade boundary led to 10,000 pupils nationally being “unfairly” given a D grade in English in June when they would have received a C had the work been assessed in January.

In a High Court hearing last month the alliance said some students had been the victims of a radical change in grade boundaries that occurred without warning after Ofqual had given an instruction to exam boards to avoid “grade inflation” with year-on-year improvements. They claimed there was “grade manipulation” by the examination boards to meet Ofqual’s “statistical fix” and this amounted to an unlawful abuse of power.

Both exam boards and Ofqual denied they acted unlawfully or unfairly.

Campaigners want to get the decision to move the grade boundaries overturned and students work remarked in line with the marking system used for the January papers. A verdict on the case is expected this month and campaigners are warning that the Department for Education should not have published the tables based on last summer’s GCSE results while the grades of thousands of students were being questioned.

Coun Judith Blake, Leeds City Council’s executive member for children’s services who played a leading role in the legal challenge, said that the GCSE issue should have been dealt with before the league tables based on the results were released.

She said; “We are very disappointed that this has been allowed to drag on for as long as it has and that it has taken so much time to resolve this issue.

“It seems very unfair to the schools affected.”

Robert Campbell, the vice chairman of the National Association of Head Teachers Secondary School Committee warned that schools futures could be at risk based on flawed data.

He said: “Our view is that the tables should not have been published and it is unfair to measure schools performance on these results.

“Being published in January means these tables are always based on some unvalidated data as a result of resits and appeals but it is not normally such a large number as this year.

“A school’s English score is central to two of the main performance measures used in these tables. Both the main measure of how many pupils achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths and also the value added tables.”

He also questioned how the Government was able to increase the minimum targets being faced by schools – from 35 per cent of pupils achieving at least five A while the exam regulator was acting to stop grade inflation.

Ofqual has a policy known as “comparable outcomes” which aims to prevent “year-on-year increases without good reason” in exam results because this can undermine public confidence in the qualifications.

However Mr Campbell asked how this approach can work alongside a Government demanding that schools in the most challenging circumstances improve performance. “It does seem a very odd message for schools to receive.” Mr Campbell added: “For schools on the wrong side of the 40 per cent benchmark it can be a very uncomfortable. It is not an exaggeration to say that it can effect their future.”