Daniel Stucke

Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study - My Response

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:37:34 +0100

April the 16th is the deadline for responses to the Draft National Curriculum Programmes of Study. Much has been written and said about the creation of the Computing nee ICT programme of study and it’s creation process. I’ve written myself around the topic a number of times over it’s journey from the Nesta report to our decision to start a Computing GCSE back in 2011 (feeling pretty smug about that decision!) to the diss-application of the old PoS to our new KS3 curriculum.

Really I should respond to the proposals, so here in the interest of sharing and discussing are my (personal) responses to the official consultation. I’ll try my best to avoid the politics and keep our young people and their futures at the heart of this response.

The response below largely refers to Computing/ICT, much as I could be tempted into discussing other subjects.

1.Do you have any comments on the proposed aims for the National Curriculum as a whole as set out in the framework document?

It is sad to see English education being reduced to “core knowledge”. There is a real danger that an overly prescriptive curriculum, based on too much core knowledge, combined with the ongoing pressures of league tables and Ofsted will lead many weaker teachers and schools to cramming facts into our young learners. Will this develop the skills and competencies for future learning and work that they will require? I don’t think so. I’ll never argue that learning times tables and other key pieces of knowledge are crucial, but that’s not al there is to education is it?

2.Do you agree that instead of detailed subject-level aims we should free teachers to shape their own curriculum aims based on the content in the programmes of study?

In principal yes. But where there are extensive changes, the Computing curriculum being the most obvious, it is important that sufficient support is available for schools and teachers to create effective curricula.

3.Do you have any comments on the content set out in the draft programmes of study?

The Computing programme of study is a massive change from ICT. I’m in support of replacing much of the old PoS, as is evident in much of my previous writing. Programming and a more detailed understanding of how computers work is important.

The PoS that has been proposed seems to be heavily weighted towards Computing/Computer Science, at the expense of creative pursuits and digital literacy. Whilst they are clearly left in the final two points of the KS3 PoS, they seem to have been left in as an afterthought. Whether that’s the intention, it is certainly the appearance that is given.

Some of the Computer Science points are somewhat extreme. I’m not at all convinced that all 13 year olds need to understand 2 sorting algorithms and two searching algorithms, and I’m quite convinced that they do not need to be able to represent text or images in binary by hand! There is plenty of time for those students who wish to continue with Computing at GCSE level to pick up these more detailed skills at this point.

For those who will not work in the IT industry or go on to develop their programming skills in more detail this proposed PoS does not offer enough opportunities for learners to develop their skills of safely, creatively using IT to solve problems, something that every one of them will need to be able to do for the rest of their life.

4.Does the content set out in the draft programmes of study represent a sufficiently ambitious level of challenge for pupils at each key stage?

See answer to section 3.

5.Do you have any comments on the proposed wording of the attainment targets?

See answer to section 3.

6.Do you agree that the draft programmes of study provide for effective progression between the key stages?

Progression in knowledge maybe. But it is very unclear how this progression is to be measured. I’m no huge fan of National Curriculum levels as can be seen in our research work on Badges for assessment. But they have certainly served a purpose, particularly in core subjects. If we are still to be measured on the levels of progress from KS2 to KS3 and KS2 to KS4 then what will these measures be based upon? It’s not even clear if KS2 levels will continue within core subjects - but that’s a whole different conversation. As ASCL’s quality response suggests, educators are more than capable of replacing NC Levels with something better, but again we need the time and collaboration opportunities to develop these. The complete lack of clarity in this area is of real concern.

7.Do you agree that we should change the subject information and communication technology to computing to reflect the content of the new programmes of study?

What’s in a name? I have no issues with the change to ‘Computing’. Politics and policies have muddied the name of ICT so a change can’t do much harm.

8.Does the new National Curriculum embody an expectation of higher standards for all children?

If standards are measured in facts committed to memory by a certain age then yes. If standards mean skills for lifelong learning, and knowledge and understanding that develops at different rates for different learners, then I’m not sure it does.

9.What impact - either positive or negative - will our proposals have on the ‘protected characteristic’ groups.

There is significant danger that learners from protected characteristic groups will be turned off the use of IT in their future lives. The heavy focus on Computer Science will be a considerable learning challenge for them. Combined with the issues of delivering these (see subsequent comments on CPD) effectively they may well fail to progress in Computing, quickly become disaffected with the subject and leave school without basic digital literacies that they will need to access employment.

10.To what extent will the new National Curriculum make clear to parents what their children should be learning at each stage of their education?

The majority of parents will have little or no idea what the majority of the Computing points mean.

As far as clarifying which facts should be known by what age things should be relatively clear. Does that explain what students should actually be learning and how?

11.What key factors will affect schools’ ability to implement the new National Curriculum successfully from September 2014?

Three key factors put the success of the proposed KS3/4 PoS for Computing at huge risk of failure:

The content, as detailed in previous responses, risks turning many learners off the subject of Computing. Unless they are delivered with skills which leads on to…

Staff training:

Most schools in England will not be able to deliver the KS3 (&KS4) Computing programme of study from September 2014 without a massive investment in training. Our school has a talented ICT department however we consist of a Maths teacher, a Business Studies teacher and an unqualified ICT teacher (who fortunately understands programming). This is not atypical. I do not know the percentage of teachers teaching ICT at present who have degrees in Computer Science, or who can program, but I would estimate it at around 10%. That leaves approximately 90% of the ICT teaching workforce who do not know the content proposed in the PoS.

To teach well and deliver difficult concepts to students at an early age it is vital that teachers are experts in the field, that they have a deep understanding of the subject matter and hopefully experience of teaching it. This is all missing at present.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) demands to deliver this PoS at all, let alone by September 2014 will be huge. Most ICT teachers will need to learn to the concepts behind programming, then learn a programming language, and then will need to learn how to teach that knowledge effectively. That’s hundreds of hours of training for most staff. Most teachers will receive around 25 hours of CPD a year on average. CPD budgets in schools are falling in line with overall falls in school budgets under the current government.

Where will the CPD programmes to support this proposed PoS come from? Who will fund them? Who will fund the supply cover required to back fill staff while they are out on this training?

All at once: Surely it would be sensible to stagger the introduction of the new curriculum. We will be elected to teach KS3 students this curriculum, which is very different from previously, despite those same students not having been exposed to any of the new Computing knowledge in the new KS3 curriculum. Are we to play catch up with everything that they would have learned in KS2 had this been introduced bit by bit?

12.Who is best placed to support schools and/or develop resources that schools will need to teach the new National Curriculum?

Local Authorities? Nope! Becta? Ha! Vital? Oops! Teaching Schools? Not sure the majority of them have Computer Science teams!

Joking aside, this is an issue. Following the issues over the drafting of the PoS are the relationships between the likes of Naace & BCS strong enough to develop the required support together? There will be plenty of people rubbing their hands with glee and offering expensive training courses and pre-packaged schemes of work for schools at a cost. Will these be tailored to the individual schools? Of course not.

The people best placed to support schools and develop resources are the teachers themselves. There is great creativity, ingenuity, dedication, skill and enthusiasm in the current ICT teaching community. Those with the Computer Science / programming skills will be all too happy to help. This has been seen for the past 7 years or so on Twitter and across teacher blogs. There is only so much work that these volunteers can do in their spare time, could funding be sought to allow them the time and space to collaborate. The Primary National Curriculum for Computing in ITT Expert Group’s work at Primary level is a great example of what needs to be started at KS3.

13.Do you agree that we should amend the legislation to diss-apply the National Curriculum programmes of study, attainment targets and statutory assessment arrangements, as set out in section 12 of the consultation document?

Really not sure about this. What will Ofsted be looking for in classrooms in this ‘fallow’ year? Is this just a sneaky way of introducing the new PoS’s a year early?

Summary

I’m not against the proposals. A balanced increase in Computer Science and a bringing up to date of the other areas of the old ICT curriculum are well overdue. However the proposals that have been produced do seem to be overly weighted towards Computer Science, based on what evidence and research is unclear. If this PoS is to go ahead then there are huge issues with it’s successful implementation in the proposed timescales. The creation of this document to this point has not brought the communities together and has left teachers in particular feeling completely left out of the process.

Letter Rush is yet another word game for iOS devices. I’m...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:56:43 +0100

Letter Rush is yet another word game for iOS devices. I’m looking forward to trying this out with learners at school next week. The twist is that the words that need spelling are provided for you, you then make them from the word grid as quickly as you can. Games like Letterpress or Wordtower where the player has to come up with words themselves often turn off students with weaker literacy skills, their lack of vocabulary makes the games too difficult. If they don’t feel like they’re doing we’ll they’ll quickly turn back to Minecraft!

"1. Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they..."

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:29:13 +0000

“1. Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they love trying new things and doing awesome stuff.
2. Some companies or institutions will “invent” or “discover” something that one or more of these people have been doing, and it will be branded as their own.
3. This branded “innovation” will become co-opted and corrupted, so that it doesn’t really do anything innovative, or anything other than building the reputation of the “innovators”.
4. People will hype the crap out of the “innovation” as The Future of Education, and The Saviour (or Disruption) of Universities, and present it at conferences and write papers and travel the presentation circuit explaining it to the masses.
5. The people from 1. will largely ignore the hype, shrug their shoulders, and continue doing awesome stuff because they enjoy doing awesome stuff.”

- Don’t like to repost practically a whole blog post, but Darcy Norman’s EdTech predictions for 2013 hit a chord!

Would add in the middle:

3b) People fail to realise why this innovation worked so well in the specific learning environment it was originally designed for in 1. and claim it works brilliantly for them when in reality it probably doesn’t.

Our New ICT Curriculum #ICTCurric

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:40:22 +0000

Probably worth reading my last post about the disapplication of the previous ICT Program of Study and our plans to take it’s place at KS3 before proceeding with this one.

So what have we done in the 4 months since my last post?

Our fabulous ICT Department have thrashed out what we believe to be the key elements of an ICT curriculum for 2012. Taking inspiration from many places (again see the last post) we’ve come up with a core set of topics which we believe will support our learners in accessing our two KS4 qualifications if they decide to do so in the future (GCSE Computing & Creative iMedia), whilst giving them the digital skills and literacies that we believe they will need to be successful in all areas of their future learning and work.

Our core topics are:

Living Online
Publishing Online
Formal Digital Communications
Researching Online
Digital Presenting
Visual Programming & Control
Text Based Programming
Handling Digital Data
Digital Imaging
Digital Video
Digital Sound
Project Planning
Project Evaluation

We’ve decided to call our new curriculum ‘ICT’ - after much debate we decided it still fits the job nicely!

We’ve also throughly embraced the idea of using badges to reward and assess progress. We’re fortunate that I’m also responsible for data and assessment at our school so I’ve kindly given us permission to scrap National Curriculum levels entirely for KS3 ICT. In their place come our Badges, these will eventually be in Bronze, Silver & Gold levels for each topic. It’s an interesting experiment but we really believe that knowing you’ve achieved a Silver Award in Digital Presentation and a Bronze Award in Living Online will mean far more to learner and parent than being told they are working at a 4b. Time will tell.

We have been carefully constructing the learning objectives / learning outcomes for the badges and learners have been collating their evidence towards these using Realsmart rPassports. They’re being awarded on Edmodo for now, eventually we hope to use the full Mozilla Open Badges framework.

To give you a feel for these here’s one objective from the Living Online badge:

I can use social networks safely because I have:

reviewed the security and safety settings of my social networks
analysed my contacts and ensured that they are appropriate and can see only what I want them to
discussed the potential dangers of social networking, highlighting typical signs of danger
described how to report suspicious or abusive behaviour that I might encounter online
chosen the right social network for the right communications and interactions

Please feel free to see more detail on our wiki and feel free to offer your comments here. It’s very much a work in progress, we’ve got a framework in the background and are trying to keep a half term ahead of ourselves throughout the year.

It’s interesting to note that since this whole adventure started with Mr Gove’s original invitation to ICT teachers to embrace this new found freedom, he has since decided to retract that and come up with a new program of study, as far as I can tell behind closed doors from the very educators he encouraged to take up the mantle. Hopefully it will bear much resemblance to what we’re doing here. If not we’ll probably carry on with what we feel is right any way.

So far it’s been a really enjoyable start to the year. Staff have been enjoying teaching relevant skills and literacies to the students and they are getting the hang of badges. As we start awarding the first badges over the next week or so I am confident it’s going to really take off. I’m also really positive that when we get onto the likes of Digital Presentation we’re going to start seeing students using lots of evidence from other subjects to support their badges. I hope that this in turn becomes a nice guide to staff in other departments as to the actual ICT skills of our learners. With my Maths teacher head on I think it would be great to be able to look at a glance at the specific skills of my class and know in advance if they have experience of managing data or doing basic programming. Historically other teachers wouldn’t really have a clue as to the ICT skills of a student, making integrating ICT in other subjects more difficult.

Exciting times :)

XKCD - A History Of The United States Congress. Once again...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:16:32 +0000

XKCD - A History Of The United States Congress.

Once again Randall Munroe shows himself to be the undisputed king of the info-graphic (previous favourite used in many a maths lesson). My knowledge of American history is poor, this in fascinating and informative and does an amazing job to pile an entire modern nation’s political history into one diagram.

Fizz Buzz Scratch

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 15:02:40 +0100

The title sounds like a nasty affliction - but I actually want to describe a great lesson!

I was looking for a nice challenge for my Year 9 Computing class to continue developing their understanding of variables, if statements and loops - ideally moving on to nested statements and loops.

As ever Twitter came to the rescue when politely asked.

FizzBuzz was a great idea, having already built a program myself this year on Codecademy I knew it could step nicely through the required skills and work fine in Scratch.

I decided to break this into 4 challenges so that I could scaffold the learning a little for the group, their challenge was to :

Build a program that asked for an input number and then either repeated the number or said ‘Fizz’ if it was a multiple of 3.
Extend so that multiples of 5 reply ‘Buzz’.
Extend so that multiples of 3 and 5 return ‘FizzBuzz!’
Change program so that rather than returning just one value it counts up from 1 to a user inputted number.

This turned out to work really well - particularly part 3. Students tended to duplicate code and check sequentially for the different multiples. Meaning that an entry of 15 would often output all three responses. When I pushed students to adapt their program to return just ‘FizzBuzz’ in this case they began to think in depth about how their If then Else statements worked and to experiment with nesting the statements. Finally part for introduced loops to their previous work.

By then end students had a great understanding of how and why you would nest statements and a much better idea of when a program would cease based on a True If statement and when it would continue.

Here’s an example of a finished Scratch program:

Next steps for this class are to do this all again but with some real code this time. We’re going to work through the Javascript Fundamentals course on www.codecademy.com and tackle the Fizz Buzz challenge there. That will pretty much wrap up their taster of GCSE Computing - hopefully it’ll have some of them hooked and they’ll choose to take the course in Year 10.

Computing meet Maths meet Scratch, Maths meet Scratch meet Computing

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:20:00 +0100

I have the pleasure of teaching two great Year 9 classes this year. One is a fabulous Maths group that I have taught for the past two years, another is an ICT taster class (we have brought taster options into Year 9 this year, allowing students to get a taster of KS4 courses - this group is doing a few months of Computing and a few months of Creative iMedia).

To introduce the concepts of variables, if statements and loops in the Computing class we’ve been working with Scratch. We already use Scratch in Y7/8 to cover some of the control aspects of the old curriculum. This normally takes the form of a simple maze game.

Being the Mathematician that I am some simple Maths challenges seemed like a good place to start. We’ve created a times table machine that lists the first 10 numbers in any times table and a host of other challenges that a colleague of mine wrote.

This week I set them the challenge of writing a program that found all the factors of a number. This used the mod function to check for a remainder when dividing, a loop an if statement and a list (Scratch’s 1 dimensional array) to store the answers in.

Here’s an example of what this looked like:

This worked so well I realised that this was a great way to teach Maths too! Coming up with a solution to this problem really gets to the bottom of what a factor is and how you can calculate it.

With this in mind I took advantage of a double lesson with my Maths group to very quickly teach them the basics that we’d covered in Computing and set them the same challenge. We also then moved onto checking whether the number was a prime (by checking the number of factors in the final list, if = 2 then it’s a prime). We left the class discussing whether it would be possible to make Scratch calculate the Highest Common Factor of two inputs. I wasn’t sure if it was up to it, but a little work at home and I’ve managed to make it work:

I was pretty proud of myself. I plan to set this little challenge to the class this week as a homework and see if anyone can come up with a solution. It’s probably more of a programming challenge than a Maths challenge but either way I think it’s a great little challenge and I’m continually impressed with the flexibility and scope of Scratch.

I’m particularly excited to see what Scratch 2.0 has in store for us.

I’ve used Scratch years ago as a LOGO replacement in Maths too, writing a program to draw regular polygons is a great challenge to develop an understanding of internal/external angles.

With this in mind I’m planning to teach at least one topic each half term this year using Scratch with my Maths class.

As for the Computing group, next challenge was a game of FizzBuzz, more on that in a future post.

If you’d like to download and play with the Scratch programs mentioned then click to download:

Factors Tables CommonFactors

What Maths have you taught via programming tasks? Ideas and examples would be most welcome in the comments!

Theon Elliot Stucke meet the World. World, meet Theon (Taken...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:48:16 +0100

Theon Elliot Stucke meet the World. World, meet Theon (Taken with Instagram)

Guided Access is a great new accessibility feature on the iPad...

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 12:28:00 +0100

Guided Access is a great new accessibility feature on the iPad that allows you to lock an iPad (or other iOS device) into one application and even restrict which parts of the screen can be interacted with.

Some of our staff have been concerned about handing their iPads over to learners, conscious that their confidential emails etc are also accessible, this is a pretty great solution to that.

parislemon: What it looks like to descend to Mars. In color, no...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 10:37:22 +0100

parislemon:

What it looks like to descend to Mars. In color, no less.

(via Seldo)

Incredible really. Amazing what a bit of Science and Maths can achieve.

nedhepburn: Dead at 82, Neil Armstrong.

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 22:16:14 +0100

nedhepburn:

Dead at 82, Neil Armstrong.

Hi. I'm a student in the UK and I took the AQA English higher exams in June. I just wanted to say thank you for your post explaining what AQA are being accused of. I was rather confused about what exactly happened, but after reading your post I understand. I'm hoping that the boundaries are forced into changing, and I hope your 15 students get some recognition for their achievements and end up with a C!

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:58:00 +0100

Thanks Stormy! I hope that something is done in the coming weeks to rectify this, for individuals first of all and schools secondly.

Playing With Lives - English GCSE Analysis

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:51:00 +0100

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of 16 year olds opened an envelope to find out the fruits of the first 11 years of hard work at school. College courses, apprenticeships, jobs and more rested on the grades they had been given in their GCSE exams. The night before they were already panicking that something might be wrong with their English results.

Schools receive exam results the day before so that we can analyse them, print out the all important results and stuff them in envelopes etc.. Access us usually restricted to a handful of school leaders and the data / exams team. All is quiet until Thursday morning. But as we know now Wednesday was different, Twitter and the TES Forum were alive with worry and disgust at many of the English exams. The press picked up on this in the evening and hit front pages and breakfast news before the children had even had chance to find out their own results.

So what exactly has happened? Grade boundaries were changed between the January sitting and the June sitting. But due to the way the courses are constructed it’s more complicated than that. No apologies for the in-depth analysis here - I think it’s needed, I hope it’s useful for other schools, I hope the exam boards and Ofqual can respond. If there are errors in my understanding / logic / calculations then please let me know. This analysis looks at AQA’s English Language exam, as that’s the one we do, it’s also the English exams sat by 62% of the country this year.

A bit of background: There are three English exams from AQA (as with all boards). There is English (4700) which is mainly taken by lower ability students as it removes the need to sit the Literature aspect but still counts towards league tables. Alongside this there are English Language (4705) and English Literature (4710). Whilst it’s only the English Language part that counts as ‘English’ in the performance tables (5A*-C with E&M etc) a student has to have sat the Literature paper for it to count. Each exam is also split into a Foundation (grades C-U) and Higher (grades A*-D) tier, just to confuse matters.

The results for the 4700 and 4705 differ greatly, the 4700 English exam had only 31% C+ passes, however this is to be expected due to the nature of the students being entered for that paper. 4705 English Language was 75% C+. This works out at a combined total pass rate of 63.7% for English as a whole with AQA, neatly just below the national figure of 64.2% - just where Ofqal wanted it. Remember that figure it will be useful later, but bear in mind that these figures show the total for those students who sat the exams (and entered controlled assessments) both in the January and June sittings.

English Language (4705) is made up of 3 component Units. See diagram from AQA:

Schools can ‘cash in’ these units at any point during the course, and this is where the key issue and scandal is present. The grade boundaries for all three of these units have changed from January entries to June.

The Exam:

Unit 1 is an exam, and each exam is different so you would expect to see a small change in grade boundaries from one exam to the next depending on how hard it is and to a degree how well all the students have done on it. This happens with every exam board and every subject and is not a problem. However this year something fairly extreme happened here, look at these two tables from Edexcel:

Unit 1 January:

Unit 1 June:

The raw mark required to gain a grade C has moved from 43/80 to 53/80. This is a 12.5% shift (For the Higher Tier it was 41/80 to 43/80). Now the exam in June could just have been poorly written and pupils found it incredibly easy, requiring a shift upwards of the boundaries. At my school we entered most students in both January and June for the written exam. It was a new spec and we wanted an accurate gauge of their progress. I compared the average UMS mark (you’ll see that this is standardised so that a C is always the same - it allows comparison from one different exam to another) of our pupils who sat the same paper in both sittings.

Our Foundation Tier students gained 2 UMS Marks (out of 120) on average from January to June. This isn’t much of an improvement considering the amount of highly targeted intervention we put in. However it does show that the 10 mark grade boundary shift wasn’t entirely uncalled for. (Although you could argue it was poor to produce two exams of such differing difficulty).

Our Higher Tier students lost 10 UMS Marks. They apparently did 8% worse in their Summer exam after an extra 6 months of hard work. This can’t be right, and we’re fortunate in that because they sat the paper twice they will have taken forward their best result, for many this was from their January paper. This implies that the mark boundary on the Higher Tier should actually have fallen from January to June. Or it implies AQA completely messed up with their boundaries in January, making it way to easy to get a C. I suspect it was a bit of both.

The Controlled Assessments:

There were two controlled assessments as detailed above. These replace what used to be coursework. They are completed in exam conditions within the classroom, marked by the teachers and then moderated by an AQA assessor. The tasks remain the same throughout the two year course and they can be ‘cashed in’ at any point in the two years. So unlike the exams it only stands to reason that if a piece of CA is submitted in January it should gain exactly the same mark as if it were submitted in June. It is after all identical. This didn’t happen.

The grade boundaries for these changed from January to June. Here are the figures:

Unit 2 January:

Unit 2 June:

Unit 3 January:

Unit 3 June:

See what happened there? Same child, same work, different submission date, harder to get a C. That’s simply unfair on individual children and also on schools.

Between the two controlled assessments it takes an extra 6 marks out of 125 to get a C.

So a school that had completed all the controlled assessments and submitted them in January will have performed better than one who had completed them but held off to submit everything at the end of the course. And individual students will have received worse grades because of this submission date which was out of their control and was unforeseeable to the schools.

The goalposts were indeed moved, and made smaller, and that’s simply unfair.

The Impact:

By my calculations 15 students at our school would have received a grade C instead of a grade D if their controlled assessments were measured against the January boundaries. And as a school we would have increased our 5A*-C with English & Maths percentage by 5 points instead of seeing it drop by 2. That’s huge for the 15 students (more also dropped in other grades) and it’s huge for us. We’re expecting Ofsted later this year and may now struggle to get another Outstanding judgement as pupil progress is a limiting factor. Parents will judge us on that figure when considering whether they should send their child to our school. This would have been far worse if we hadn’t entered students for the exam in January and will be why certain school have been particularly badly affected (we’d have lost another 8 Cs).

Causes:

Political pressure could have been involved, I doubt we’ll ever know. Ofqal’s insistence that overall grade ‘inflation’ should stagnate this year has more to do with it.

But my gut feeling is that AQA made a horrible mess back in January and have now attempted to fix it with all the finesse and honesty of a heavyweight boxer.

Remember 75% of students still achieved a C+ in this examination. But we don’t know how they were split between January and June. My suspicions are that AQA messed up the January grade boundaries. It may have been too easy to get a C back then.

Wind that forward to June and with similar grade boundaries it stands to reason that AQA were about to award 80%+ a C in English Language. This would have blown Ofqal’s grade inflation requests out of the water. So to counter that they have raised all the grade boundaries, making it much harder to get a C in June. And as we’ve discussed, with regards to the controlled assessments, that is completely immoral.

This is a simplistic example but will do for illustration…. Using January boundaries we missed 10% of our C+s in English. If this happened in every AQA English sitting school there would have been an extra 38,000 Grade Cs in England. That would bump the total to 420,000 nationwide, resulting in 68.7% C+ grades, an ‘inflation’ of 3% and a very unhappy Ofqal & Mr Gove.

January was a mess. AQA fixed it with an biased sledgehammer.

What next?

If this hypothesis is correct then I think the entire 2012 results need to be reassessed fairly by a third party. If boundaries from January need to be made harder then so be it. But individual students cannot be penalised for the arbitrary date of their controlled assessment submission.

Schools should contest these results. Possibly as a whole.

AQA should issue a clear statement explaining exactly what has happened. A breakdown of results comparing January to June would be interesting.

Ofsted and co need to be very careful about their use of league table comparison figures this year due to the fact that they now cannot be used to compare one school fairly with another.

If you want to use my spreadsheet that calculates the different grades a pupil would have achieved based on the submission date of CAs then please feel free. You need to enter UMS marks in the relevant yellow cells. (I set up a marksheet in SIMS and then exported to a spreadsheet - you may wish to do the same). If you spot any errors in my calculations or logic please let me know. It’s set up for the English Language, but could be easily change to the straight English course if you change the lookup on sheet 2 from ENL01 to ENG01 details.

EDIT: Something of a response here from AQA. Interesting that 94% of CA was submitted in June. Which puts a slightly different slant on it but still means that the 6% entered early were at a huge advantage as per above. And no comment on the difference in difficulty between the Unit 1 exams. Did our pupils really get 10% worse in the last 6 months? Still stand by my assumption that things were too ‘easy’ in January, too ‘hard’ in June. Unfair.

"An average US citizen on an average day, consumes 100,500 words, whether that be email, messages on..."

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 18:40:30 +0100

“

An average US citizen on an average day, consumes 100,500 words, whether that be email, messages on social networks, searching websites or anywhere else digitally..

..And as we sleep for seven hours a day, in practice that means that three quarters of waking time is spent receiving information, the majority of which is electronic.

”

- And to think of the number of conversations I’ve had / overheard this year complaining that our students just don’t read anything anymore!

Some reading...

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:50:49 +0100

Some reading...:

Like the good old days of ‘edu-blogging’ Lisa Nielsen has compiled 20 great blogs to read. Go add them to your good old fashioned rss reader and enjoy!

kottke.org: Turn your Twitter stream into your friends' linkblog

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 07:50:57 +0100

kottke.org: Turn your Twitter stream into your friends' linkblog:

jkottke:

A few weeks ago, Twitter added an option to search the tweets of only the people you follow. This is useful for several different reasons (try searching for [recent pop culture key phrase] to see what I mean) but for those who use Twitter primarily to find cool links to read/watch, it’s an…

This is really handy, now if anyone can tell me how to turn that search into an RSS feed so that I can pull all my friends tweets with links into a feed reader I’d be eternally grateful.

parislemon: nasdaq: If you’ve spent the last several years...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:57:02 +0100

parislemon:

nasdaq:

If you’ve spent the last several years wondering what exactly you could buy if you were as rich as Apple, look no further: 73 London Olympics! 1,547 Titanics! 884 billion iTunes tracks! 257 Manchester Uniteds!

You can relax now. Happy Weekend!

2.14 Greeces.

What could Apple buy? Infographics. Maths. I like.

The Future Of ICT

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 21:08:00 +0100

There has been much said about the subject of ICT in secondary schools since Michael Gove spoke at BETT. I wrote with some excitement the day after, actually praising Mr Gove for once in my life! Excited with the potential freedom and with an idea to leave National Curriculum levels behind and look towards a potentially badge based system based on mastery and application of specific skills.

Since then there has been much discussion, particularly revolving around the move towards Computer Science, including suggested curricula from the likes of Naace and reports from the likes of BCS. Meanwhile ICT teachers and leaders across the country have been formulating their own plans. From excellent sounding meetings like #RethinkingICT to the work on #DigitalStudies from Brian Sharland and co.

Opportunities and dangers lie ahead. There will be schools around the country who are not ‘connected’ to the works mentioned above, and there will be companies knocking out curriculum packs of crap to dump onto outmoded VLEs. For those schools and students I do worry. But there is also a chance to create customised, localised, exciting learning opportunities in our schools. We’re just starting to get our heads around this at our school.

So what next? We currently run successful Key Stage 4 courses in Creative iMedia and Computing GCSE. Our curriculum offer in KS3 needs to work towards preparing our students for these whilst preparing those who don’t take it on to KS4 level with the digital skills they will need for their future. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we deliver some great ICT units at our school at the moment, but this is an opportunity to go right back to the basics of a school curriculum, look at our values and beliefs and tailor something specifically towards our students.

We are in the process of taking the National Curriculum that is being disapplied, the Naace curriculum, the ideas from the team at #DigitalStudies and elsewhere to create our own core curriculum. Online identities are in, databases are out, more visual programming is in, but not everyone needs to code in C, etc etc.. It’s liberating to have the opportunity to do this.

I’ve had many discussions with the team creating #DigitalStudies and have much praise for the work they’ve done so far. But my biggest criticism, for want of a better word, is the lack of a curriculum. A core curriculum consisting of a list of topics, skills and knowledge that a subject will deliver is still crucial in my humble opinion. Whether this is then delivered through project based learning, independent inquiry, traditional teaching, or better still a combination of all three - this should still all be built around a curriculum. We’ll probably end up with a little more than we can cover in little over an hour a week, but there’s a plan for that…

Assessment is broken. Broken in subjects such as ours with so little contact time on the timetable. Levelling students with National Curriculum sub-levels just about works in my native subject of Maths. We see the children frequently, there is a detailed curriculum and we all know what level each skill is. It’s still not perfect, knowing your level is one thing, knowing what to do to make the next step of progression is another altogether. As chief in charge of data and assessment in our school, several years of teaching ICT has made me realise how futile my request that every subject submits an NC level each half term is. If we’re being honest, do I know what a level 5c is in ICT? Does the learner? Does the parent? No? Thought not. Gove has recently suggested that Primary schools will no longer have to use National Curriculum levels in their assessments or reporting, I suspect the same will become true of the whole of KS3 over the course of the next few years. With all this in mind it’s time for a fresh idea.

Badges have been talked about probably as much as ICT over the past 6 months. Mozilla’s Open Badges project looks like a great idea and has captured the imagination of many educators, myself included. I fully support the idea of accrediting much of the informal learning that people do outside of formal educational institutions. But I also feel that there is an opportunity to use a badge system to accredit learner progress within schools. We are planning to develop a range of badges for the key skills and competencies within our new curriculum. These will probably take the form of Gold, Silver & Bronze levels for each area.

For example, awards/badges in:

using visual programming languages
online identities
research
presentation
etc etc

Learners will be expected to collate a range of evidence to support the award of each badge. We’re currently working towards fairly generic sounding badges, trying to avoid referring to specific tools (which frequently become out of date before learners have even finished school). I hope that learners will use a range of evidence not just from within our subject but from across their work inside and outside of school. I also hope that if we can get these right it will really help support other teachers and departments - pushing the dream of ICT becoming more integrated across the curriculum.

I believe that these will be a hit with learners and their parents. Finding out that your daughter has gained her Silver Presentation badge and her Bronze award in Publishing Online over the past term should be far more informative than being told they are working at Level 5a. I hope learners will have something valuable to take with them into later life, a set of badges they’ll be proud to display on their own professional blogs one day - this is after all effectively my online CV these days.

I’ve really enjoyed working with the team to thrash out our curriculum and plans for the coming years, it’s great to rip apart what you do and build it back up from core values and principles. It’s also been refreshing to see just how much of what we believe to be important we have been teaching already over recent years - we won’t have to re-write all the actual lesson content from scratch. We’ve also naturally headed into some interesting discussions about the purpose of ICT as a subject.

One thing we’re not quite set on… what to call the subject? Does ICT have a ‘bad name’ now that needs changing? Digital Studies is a great name - but somebody has got there first! We’re not teaching Computer Science so that won’t do (not that we don’t have elements of it, but the BCS curriculum suggests we should teach all 13 year olds what packet switching is - and that’s clearly nonsense!!). Perhaps ICT2.0 or something equally naff?!

Once we’ve tidied up our draft curriculum and worked on the badges a little more I’ll share it all here. We’re very interested in feedback from the ICT community and would be delighted to work with other schools who are heading in a similar direction.

Digital Leaders & Mightybell

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:24:00 +0100

A short post to accompany a presentation at the AECRICT12 TeachMeet at Manchester Met Uni tonight.

Digital Leaders is a simple but brilliant idea that has gained great traction in schools across the UK and beyond over the past 3 years. In a nutshell.. use students to lead technology supported learning in your school. Student leadership in school is nothing new, and their knowledge and use of technology surpassing that of your staff is nothing new either. So why not put those two ideas together and see where it leads you? I’ve written before about it’s origins from GenYES to Kristian Still to Bob Harrison, Toshiba, Vital, the SSAT and on to many many great practitioners about the country.

There is currently an informal network that Shelli Blackburn and co are doing a great job of promoting, there’s also a more formal (with cost attached) SSAT network.

But you don’t even need these networks to start your own Digital Leaders, here’s a recipe…

Advertise in your school for the positions;
Request digital applications;
Give pupils a formal interview - it’s a great experience for them;
Hold a meeting/club every week or so, let the new team help you drive the use of technology across your school;
Sit back and enjoy!

It’s as simple as that!

Mightybell is a great new website from the talented people that originally brought the world Ning.

Think of it as a cross between a message board and Pinterest. It’s incredibly easy to share links, videos, images, questions and posts, normally 2 clicks at most. And everything that’s added has an attached conversation. Below you can see a snap of our Stretford High Digital Leaders space that we use to share ideas and keep in touch in-between meetings.

And finally to tie it all together why don’t you join a Mightybell space that I’ve created to share examples and ideas from Digital Leaders around the world?!? Please feel free to join the space and add links to ideas or examples of work that your Digital Leaders have done.

iOS Podcasts App now out. Podcasts on Apple mobile devices have...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:58:31 +0100

iOS Podcasts App now out. Podcasts on Apple mobile devices have always been a bit hidden away. This separates them out into their own app. Another great educational tool (I know there are plenty of other alternatives too!).