New consultation on accountability looks to shake up Progress 8 - but will it incentivise what it hopes to?

The long-awaited schools white paper, 'Every child achieving and thriving', has been published today. Leading the way are the reforms to the SEND system, as well as the consultation on those reforms, which I know many have been anticipating.

However, as a former assistant headteacher in charge of data, it was the consultation on secondary school accountability measures announced, that really caught my eye. The consultation proposes four major changes to the secondary school accountability measures.

Changes to Progress 8

Two of the changes relate to the Progress 8 measure.

Replacing the three EBacc and three open bucket slots in the current progress 8 measure with two science slots, two 'breadth' slots and two 'choice' slots

This is probably the biggest change announced in the consultation, as we see the final draft of what was originally proposed in the government's response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review in November, with some tweaks and further information.

Ostensibly this is to attempt to reverse the 'decline' in the take up of arts subjects since the introduction of the EBacc back in 2010. However, opinion remains divided as to how big an impact the EBacc has actually had on arts take ups.

As can be seen in these graphs (which I generated with the help of Google's Gemini AI tool), the only arts subject to experience a significant decline in the last 15 years is design and technology (DT). However the rate of this decline is similar in Wales (which does not have the EBacc performance measure) when compared to England. This is much more likely to be attributable to the increased costs to schools in offering DT at GCSE, and the significant fall in the recruitment of design and technology teachers meaning that some schools will simply not be able to recruit DT teachers to be able to offer DT as a GCSE option. This is not to mention the changes to the design and technology GCSE, the removal of the Food GCSE from the DT umbrella and the rise in vocational qualifications that mirror different aspects of the design and technology GCSE, which will all have some impact on the reported take up of design and technology at GCSE. The other subjects in these graphs all show similar rates of decline across England, Scotland and Wales (with the exception of drama in Scotland), suggesting wider societal factors are at play here than simply the introduction of the EBacc.

Even with the removal of the EBacc performance measure, it is hard to see how this can do much to improve the take up of arts subjects. I am sure there are some schools out there that will force pupils down an EBacc pathway simply to try and boost their EBacc take up figures, however I would suggest the majority of schools will be ensuring as many pupils as possible take an EBacc option because either:

1. They believe in the messaging from the previous government that these qualifications are truly the gateway qualifications to further academic study, or
2. Their curriculum and staffing is set up for offering more of the EBacc subjects through KS3 and KS4 than arts subjects.

This second point is not to be underestimated. To offer more creative subjects at GCSE, or to increase take up, schools need to spend more time at KS3 preparing pupils for GCSEs in these subjects. This means diverting time at KS3 away from other subjects (most likely the humanities), towards these subjects. This requires more teachers, more specialist equipment or larger spaces (in the case of drama and dance), that many schools will not be set up to provide. Smaller schools especially would struggle with the financial burden of these subjects compared to predominantly classroom based subjects such as history, geography and RS if take up of the arts were to significantly increase, and would almost certainly have to reduce their humanities staffing. These smaller schools are already likely to be reviewing their staffing following the government pledge during the aforementioned curriculum and assessment review to ensure that the three separate science GCSEs are available in every school - if these schools have to find extra money for science teachers and science equipment they are even more unlikely to be able to fund increases in arts teaching and equipment.

Simplified banding processes

Instead of the current banding process, which sees schools grouped into five groups based on the confidence intervals of their P8 figure, the government is proposing to simply chop schools into five quintiles based on their P8 figure, so the bottom 20% would be 'well below average', the next 20% labelled 'below average' and so on. This compares to the distribution of scores in 2024 shown below (note the image was actually produced in 2019, but the figures remained the same until 2024).

The government say this is to address issues created by confidence intervals, such as smaller schools having such wide confidence intervals that they can never be anything other than average. 

Whilst I appreciate that the current system is more convoluted, I can't help but feel that the replacement is too simplistic. The government have said that they will mitigate against the loss of confidence intervals by publishing three years worth of data alongside each other, as well as cohort sizes and an explanation about the inherent uncertainty due to cohort sizes, however it still feels off to me to have all of these categories be the same size. The figures above suggest an almost normal distribution of schools - in a normal distribution approximately 38% of the data is within 0.5 standard deviations of the mean, with about 15% then between 0.5 and 1 standard deviations on each side, and a similar proportion above or below 1 standard deviation from the mean.

Whether arrived at using the current methodology or using percentile (as opposed to quintile) measures, this distribution of schools feels right to me.

New measures introduced

Alongside these changes, the government is suggesting introducing two new measures for school accountability.

New measure for those that didn't meet the expected standard

It has long been recognised that a small number of pupils performing poorly can drastically alter a school's P8 score. The previous government went some way to address this by introducing a cap for how negative a pupil's P8 score can be, however this government is looking to go further by including a new measure of progress alongside P8 for those pupils that come to secondary school without having met the expected standard in English and maths.

The proposal is to calculate a best-fit progress score across all the subjects that a pupil sits individually - basically calculating a P3, P4, P5 etc. score and allowing the school to take the highest of these. It is hoped that this will allow schools to continue to encourage lower prior attaining pupils to attempt a broad curriculum, whilst allowing schools to highlight the progress pupils make in areas even if those pupils don't as well in other areas, or don't fill all eight of the P8 buckets.

I am sure secondary schools will welcome this move as a way of allowing them to highlight the good work that they do with struggling and disengaged learners, and I hope that schools will use this responsibly as a tool to support their planning for pupils that struggle with learning and make sensible decisions about the curriculum and assessment pathway that these pupils will follow.  

New additional achievement measure for high attainers

Alongside the current measures of percentage of pupils achieving grade 5+ and grade 4+ in English and maths, there is a proposal to include a new measure for the proportion of pupils achieving grade 7+ in English and maths. The government says that this should reinforce 'the incentives for schools to provide a rich and stretching education for all children'.

It will be interesting to see how schools respond to this measure. Much of the extra support and intervention that happens for pupils at GCSE is focused on ensuring as many pupils as possible secure grade 4 or grade 5 in English and maths. Whilst this is beneficial for schools in maximising their accountability measures, it is also beneficial for pupils as these are the grades that are most typically required for pupils to follow A-Level (or other level 3) pathways post-16. Will schools have the capacity to extend their intervention to focus on pushing grade 6 pupils to grade 7 alongside this? I hope this will not lead to less pupils getting the support they need to secure their college pathways if schools decide it is easier to try and maximise the 7+ figure than the 4+ figure (if they don't have the capacity to focus on both) - as it is generally recognised that it is easier to move a pupil from a 6 to a 7 than from a 3 to a 4.

I do think this will benefit maths in particular, however. For maths it is often the case that post-16 providers don't accept pupils for A-Level maths with less than grade 7, so this could well provide an extra incentive for schools to provide that extra stretch and challenge for pupils to achieve the grades that will allow them to go on and study A-Level mathematics.

All in all, I think it is probably right to show publicly how well the top-performing pupils go on to achieve in a school. However, context must always be taken into account. Where schools are failing to convert high-prior attainers into top grades at GCSE, this needs to be highlighted and challenged. Where schools are actually taking learners that stood little chance of reaching top grades and ensuring that they do go on to secure top grades, this also needs to be recognised and celebrated. Progress 8 can help to do this, but can be complicated by other factors. In my mind, it would be useful to compare these headline attainment figures not only to the local authority and national averages, but to other schools in similar contexts. Perhaps we could have a third comparison figure that compares to schools with similar disadvantage intake; we know that disadvantage correlates strongly with outcomes (although the government is working hard to change this) and so seeing how well a school supports pupils to achieve top grades compared to other schools with similar profiles of disadvantage would allow for more schools to be highlighted and recognised for the excellent work that they do in more difficult circumstances.

The missing piece of the puzzle here is how these new measures will feature in Ofsted's process for holding schools to account, particularly in their 'achievement' judgement on the new score cards. Given the focus throughout the latest framework on pupils with SEND or disadvantage, I would expect the measure for those that didn't meet the expected standard (which is over-represented by pupils with SEND or disadvantage) to feature prominently in their thinking.

Maths GCSE outcomes – simply a measure of how wealthy you are?

The latest GCSE outcomes have landed and, as always, the dissection by groups like Ofqual, and FFT has already begun. The headlines in maths are the slight drops in in the proportion of students achieving at or above the major headline grades (1, 4, 7) and above – a continuation of the downward trend that was started to address the grade inflation caused as a result of Centre/Teacher assessed grades awarded during the height of the COVID pandemic. This is lessened when we consider only those students aged 16, with 0.1 percentage points drop in the 1+ and 4+ figures, and a 0.3 percentage points rise at 7+; with the small overall drops attributed to the number of resit students rising, with the usual low proportion of these students achieving these thresholds.

In previous years, I would normally have either been buried in maths data, looking for the lessons we could learn for the following year and which of our students were close enough to a grade boundary to be worth entering for a review of marking or, more recently, analysing whole school data to look for successes or issues in subjects that we need to get ahead of and discuss with the head of department. Without these burdens this year, I enjoyed diving into the detail around the local and national pictures for GCSE Maths in particular, using the excellent Ofqual analytics visualisations, particularly the map of how GCSE results vary by county for each of the grade boundaries.

(Image taken from Ofqual Analytics site and shows the proportion of 16-year-old students achieving grade 7 or above in the different counties in England).

The visualisation is fairly similar for grades 4 and up, showing the much larger proportions of 16-year-olds achieving the top grades across the southern band of counties stretching from Gloucestershire in the West through to Kent in the East, passing through Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Greater London and Surrey (the other counties that are at 22% or better are Warwickshire, Cambridgeshire, Rutland and Dorset).

I have used this map before, but typically just to get the regional averages for different grades and different subjects in my school, so that our outcomes can be compared to our region as well as the national picture. However, taking a broader view this year, I decided to look at how this maps to the differences in deprivation across the country.

(Image taken from the Office for National Statistics household deprivation maps based on the 2021 National census data)

This map shows local authority district rather than county, and there are typically two or more local authorities within each county, but the overall picture is remarkably similar to the outcomes map, with the lower deprivation areas spanning that line from Gloucestershire through to Kent. The outliers in this are actually around London (where per-pupil funding can be nearly double other areas in the country) and parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria – North Yorkshire’s outcomes for 7+ are in the 20-22% range (which is around the average for the country as a whole) and all three counties have areas (arguably the more populous areas) with the highest levels of deprivation (15% or higher).

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, if you roll the Ofqual map back through each year back to 2019 (as far as the map goes) the picture remains very similar – even through the inflated COVID years. But I had never had the regional divide in both top outcomes and household wealth driven home to me in the way that comparing these two maps brings. It serves as a glaring reminder that a school can be doing truly great things and still be limited in the impact they can have due to the wealth in the area that they serve. Of course, there will be anomalies in all of these areas, schools that buck the trend for their region, individuals that achieve top grades despite coming from a significantly deprived background. Like most statistically significant patterns, there are always anecdotes that can be found that do not conform to the narrative. However, data on this scale simply doesn’t lie – your chances of achieving top outcomes in maths are considerably higher if you live in a less deprived area, than if you live in one of the most deprived areas.

The government is, of course, aware of this connection and are taking steps to try and address it, reportedly planning to reallocate “around £2bn of funding to the places and communities that need it most”. How much impact this will have on education remains to be seen – more and more schools are no longer directly under local authority control; however, many still purchase support from local authorities for things like behaviour and SEND. Still, the fact seems to remain that, until the disparity in deprivation between the home counties and the rest of the country is addressed, top outcomes for pupils in these areas are likely to remain starkly divided.

What is a valid mock?

 So Ofqual have released (on a Saturday) the criteria for deciding what a "valid mock" is for the basis of appealing a pupil's A-Level, AS-Level or GCSE grades. If you haven't yet seen them, the criteria can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appeals-based-on-mock-exams

One of the criteria in particular caught my eye:

I remember in 2015, when the new GCSE in Maths started, I made myself very familiar with the approach that exam boards take to set their boundaries. It is quite involved to say the least, using national data on prior attainment of the cohort, previous performances of other cohorts, all sorts of data. I doubt any individual school or trust could match those standard - I remember the laughable outcomes when PiXL first tried and the flack they got for the grade boundaries they came up with. My blog on our process at the time is still my most read blog: https://educatingmrmattock.blogspot.com/2016/11/new-gcse-grade-boundaries-my-thoughts.html

Which of course presents a problem. For a mock exam to be graded in line with the exam board's examination standard, I can't see any alternative but to have used the grade boundaries provided by the board, on the same paper(s) provided by the board. Anything else simply doesn't (in reality) live up to examination standards. No exam board would arbitrarily reduce boundaries to reflect that pupils haven't completed a course, which is a common practice in schools. No exam board would simply use the average of a set of grade boundaries, or apply one years grade boundaries to a different set of papers. Any school or Trust who has done this can't sign the form to say their exam was graded in line with the examination standard provided by their exam board. Nor can those schools that use papers they have created themselves, or those that use practice papers that don't have grade boundaries provided.

In my own department we use a practice paper that comes from the exam board, but does not come with boundaries. We set initial boundaries for that years ago, before the first ever exams on the new GCSE and so before their were any past papers in existence. We sat the exam at a similar time to some other local schools, pooled our results together, and applied a similar process that exam boards were applying for their first set of new GCSE papers. We then compared the results that pupils eventually got with their mock exam results, and adjusted the boundaries for the following year. We used the same papers for mocks every year since, continuously refining the grade boundaries as we got more real results to compare to. This is about the most robust system any school could implement to grading, but even this falls short of examination standards. 

Of course, the head of centre only needs to sign a form saying "I confirm this mock exam meets the criteria". No one is going to check. No one is going to ask how they know the boundaries meet the criteria. Unless this is going to be used as a "get-out" clause to deny large numbers of appeals, then I doubt this line will end up meaning much. But it should, and that is the shame of it all.

Relationships in teaching

The topic of relationships is one that undergoes perpetual discussion between people in education. Just the other day my line manager and I were talking about it. I am sure I saw a recent article appear on twitter about personality screening for teachers (although I now can't find it and the only ones appearing in my search are from 2012). Some teachers even profess to believe in a "teacher gene". Many talk about the "magic" of teachers (including this recent TES article).

Now I absolutely believe that relationships are an important, possibly the most important, part of working with young people in the classroom. But this belief raises some interesting questions:

1) How do you train people to build relationships?
2) To what extent do the systems in schools contribute to or detract from teachers' ability to form relationships? And if teachers struggle to form relationships how much of the responsibility lies with the teacher and how much with the school?
3) Can anyone learn to teach?
4) If there are certain people that are more predisposed to teach, because of some gene or some innate personality traits, then does it make economic sense to train people that don't have the predisposition as they are less likely to become "great" teachers?

I have trained a fair few teachers in the last 10 years (teaching for more than that but have been involved in training for about that long) and one of the things I learned early on is that you shouldn't train people to teach like you. However good you may be, your job as a teacher trainer is to help that teacher teach as them, not teach like you. This has obvious challenges, particularly when you are have what might be termed a "robust" personality (as mine has been described) and you are working with someone who is a lot more unassuming in their personality. These people, being more introverted, can struggle to form relationships with pupils as they are more unsure of themselves in those myriad of interactions with all the different types of pupils they come across. But does that mean they can't be effective teachers? From my own experience I would say absolutely not, but it can be hard work to give them the confidence to let them be themselves in the classroom, particularly when the "effective" teachers they are often told to go and observe are those more extroverted individuals that seem to hold a classroom through the power of their presence alone.

I have heard many teachers and leaders say that "if you can't build relationships then no behaviour system can help you". Worse, I have heard many say "the best teachers don't need the behaviour system". I always wince when I hear this, because I always think "what are the behaviour systems for if not to support teachers in building and maintaining relationships?" I know from personal experience that when behaviour systems have been robust, and applied with a measure of consistency across the school, then relationship forming is easier. If kids know that it isn't personal, that when rewards and sanctions are applied they are done so within a clearly defined policy, then it makes it easier to work with them. For this to happen of course, all teachers need to be using them. If the best teachers are not using them, then anyone who does is automatically relegated to a lower status. This tends to be less experienced staff and staff newer to the school who haven't had chance to build those relationships yet, and so this can be a double whammy for those teachers. But is this the teacher's fault for not being "personable" enough to create those relationships, or the school's fault for not setting up their systems to support this in the best way possible?

The last two of my questions are perhaps the most contentious. As a teacher, I am committed to the idea that any of my pupils can learn what I want them to learn given enough time and good teaching. So my ideals should then naturally stretch to training teachers - any one who wants to teach should be able to learn to teach well given enough time and proper support. Of course the reality is slightly different from the ideal; every year that a teacher is not teaching well then kids suffer and the support given is often by other busy practitioners that have a whole lot more on their plate. But does this mean these teachers can't learn to teach, or that we simply don't have the time and tools to teach them? If there is such a thing as a "teacher gene" then does this mean that some could never be good teachers, or just that they will have to work harder to get there. But if that is the case, I wonder how demoralising that could be for those that are committed to teaching but are told time and time again that they don't quite have "it"?

This idea of the teacher gene, or better teachers having certainly personality traits, for me has to raise the question about training. Training and maintaining a teacher costs a huge amount of money, particularly in some subjects that attract large bursaries and golden hellos on top of the large pension contributions, CPD costs etc. And this is in a time when teachers are arguably not paid enough (the English starting salary is below the OECD average, as is the top salary attainable and the average hours are the seventh highest). This has to raise questions about value for money in terms of training people to teach that are unlikely to stay in the profession, or who will take a long time to reach a good level of practice if they do. As mentioned the idea of "personality screening" prior to training a teacher has been mooted before; it was actually part of a department for education white paper in 2010 (the same one that limited the number of attempts at the QTS literacy and numeracy tests) and was due to be introduced in September 2012 according to this Telegraph article, although I don't think it ever made it into practice. The idea was referenced again in this 2016 Guardian article - with a prediction that scenario-based questions could be used to ascertain details of prospective candidates character and thus screen for those that don't have the necessary "character". I must admit to being sceptical of this - I think that most people who would want to teach would be intelligent enough to identify suitable answers to these sorts of scenarios even if it they don't actually believe it. And of course saying you would act in a certain way when faced with a scenario is completely different to being able to actually pull this off in practice.

Overall I think it is clear that relationship building is important in education, and an important thing for teachers to be able to do. The big questions arise for the implications of this in terms of teacher training and school systems. And I think we should probably have a decent go at answering them before we say things like "Good teachers always have classes hanging on their every word", "You need a teacher 'presence'" (whatever that is) or "No system can help you if you can't form relationships".

Concepts, Processes and Facts

Recently my department has been doing a lot of work towards our new Year 7 Scheme of Work. At some point (probably over the summer) I will get around to blogging about what we are doing and what has influenced it. Needless to say it is quite a departure from our current practice. The current scheme for Years 7 to 9 has been there since my predecessor was head of department. When I joined the school was only just adding Years 10 and 11 and so the development of schemes and materials rightly focused on those year groups. Now that we have seen a couple of years of GCSE through my attention has turned to Key Stage 3.

I have been doing a lot of development work with the team on some of the approaches and pedagogy behind our new scheme and one of the things we have talked about that I thought would be worth sharing is a recent session we did around the teaching of concepts, processes and facts. This is inspired, at least in part, by some of the excellent work that Kris Boulton has talked about in his mathsconf talks.

The session revolved around the idea that facts, processes and concepts are different forms of  knowledge, and will need to be approached in different ways. Although simplified, the major distinctions were:

Facts: Need to be taught explicitly and then tested repeatedly to support pupils retention in long term memory.

Processes: Need to be modelled, with each step broken down and explained, and then practised.

Concepts: Need to be illustrated and explored, allowing pupils to see the limits of the concept.

By way of example, we talked about this slide:

The line in quotation marks is taken from the National Curriculum in England as something expected of pupils in key stage 3. We looked at the distinct ideas that allowed pupils to reach the point where they could apply the properties indicated - namely they would need to know the particular given fact, they would need to be able to carry out the process of finding a missing angle on a straight line, and importantly they would need to understand what it meant for angles at a point to form a straight line. The point I made to staff is that very often we would provide pupils with the fact, then model and practice the process, and almost expect pupils to absorb the concept from the other two. Of course, this generally proves to be ineffective; we all know pupils that struggle to identify when angles form a straight line, particularly once they encounter diagrams that exhibit multiple properties. We also talked about the possibility that these were in the wrong order for teaching, and that a better order might actually look like this:

The logic being that once pupils are secure in the concept of what it means for angles at a point to form a straight line, then they learn the fact(s) associated with the concept, before carrying out the process of finding missing angles. This should support pupil learning a lot more because rather than learning a disparate and disconnected fact, they can connect the fact to the concept they have learned. There is copious research out there that suggests that connecting knowledge to other knowledge is important for pupil learning, and so approaching a topic in this way will make it easier for pupils to form those connections.

In terms of illustrating the concept we discussed different approaches - in this case I suggested that a series of examples and non-examples would allow pupils to form a strong understanding of the concept. These would be presented one at a time:

An important point here is the use of positive and negative examples that include diagrams pupils may not see until points in the future, for example the parallel line angle diagrams and circle theorem diagrams. It was pointed out that interior and exterior angles of different polygons would also be good examples to include here.

In our lesson design for the new scheme of work we will be focusing a great deal on the facts, processes and concepts we want pupils to learn, the most effective ways to teach/model/illustrate these and the best order to approach these in. I look forward to blogging about our work on this next year.

Christmas Mock Grade Boundaries - our story

Ok, I was wrong last time, this is definitely the most dangerous blog I have posted; if by dangerous I mean fraught with the capacity to be wrong and inconvenience a lot of people. So I will preface by saying I am very sorry if you base anything off of this post and it turns out to be wrong; we are all just guessing here really and guesses can go wrong. Still if it helps people clarify their own thinking, or supports people that wouldn't otherwise have a way of meeting the demands of their senior teams or other stakeholders then I suppose it is worth a little egg on the face if it turns out wrong. So here is the story of our Christmas Year 11 mocks and grade boundaries:

We sat mock exams just before the Christmas holidays,which meant that by about a week after we returned from Christmas I had pretty much all of the results from our 285 pupils (of which about 250 or so actually sat all 3 papers). By this time I also had the results of one other school with about 180 pupils in Year 11, with about 160 that had sat 3 papers, and another much smaller school that were only going to sit two papers. I used a similar process that I had at the end of Year 10; I apply a scaling formula to the Foundation paper to make it directly comparable with Higher which has worked well in the past, and then applied the proportions and other boundary setting details which have been well publicised by the exam boards and great people like Mel at @Just_Maths. This led to this set of boundaries, which we applied to our pupils:

I wasn't completely enamoured with these - I knew for example that the 9 and 8 were lower compared to where I expect them to be in the summer, and in general I thought that maybe all of the higher scores were a little low (although as you go down the grades I expect them to be closer to the real end values in the summer of 2017). I did like the Foundation ones, they seemed to sit well with what I was expecting. Given that pupils still have 5 months before they sit the real thing though, I thought these were acceptable for now. At the time I couldn't make them public, as our pupils were not given their grades back until their mock results day today.

Literally two days after we had inputted mock grades, AQA released the population statistics for the cohort. I was pleased to see that our Higher pupils had scored above average compared to the population, and our Foundation had scored lower. I took this to mean that our tiering choices were about right, although as any good statistician knows making judgements based on averages alone is a dangerous thing to do and we did have to look at the pupils at the lowest end of the higher paper scores as we had a large range of values.

Although we had already set boundaries I work with a group of 5 other schools, many of which were doing their mock exams after Christmas and so would be needing boundaries - originally the plan would be to collect all of their results and set the boundaries (which would have given us a cohort over 1000, and so had at least some hope of being reasonable). With the support of some excellent colleagues who will remain nameless I managed to get hold of some data about the population rankings that were attributed to certain scores for Higher and Foundation. This allowed for the setting of the grade 7 and 9 (and therefore also 8) at Higher, based from last year's proportions and the tailored approach as outlined in the Ofqual documentation as well as the grade 1 at Foundation. The grade 4 proved more problematic, as there was no detail about how the Higher and Foundation rankings compared to each other (I am reliably informed that it is impossible to accurately do this without the prior attainment from KS2, although my scaling formula does seem to produce quite similar results).

I was able to get hold (from a source who will definitely remain nameless) of the proportions of C grades that were awarded to 16 year olds last year for the separate tiers and based on this I was able to map out the separate values for grade 4 on the Higher and Foundation tier. This also allowed the setting of the 5 and 6 on the Higher tier, and 3 and 2 on the Foundation tier. Although it is still up for consultation (I believe), I also awarded the 3 using the approach that has been used in previous years for setting the E grade boundary on Higher, namely halving the difference in the grade 4 and 5 boundary, and then subtracting this from the grade 4 boundary.The trickiest one was actually the 5 boundary on Foundation, as there is no real guidance over this one; in the live exam I believe this will be set based on comparison of pupils scripts and prior attainment (although if anyone knows more about this I would be happy to be corrected). In the end I did have to make a bit of educated guess work with comparison back between my own papers, and ended up with boundaries for the whole AQA cohort that look like this:

I was quite pleased with the similarity of these to our boundaries, although it would appear my scaling formula is a little harsh to the Foundation pupils for mock exams (it does work quite well for real exams though). At this point though I should pass on some major health warnings and notices:

• These boundaries are NOT endorsed by AQA, and they will rightly maintain that it is impossible to set grades or boundaries for exams without prior KS2 pupil data. Although this does use data available on the portal from the AQA portal, it is only my interpretation of it.
• There are two big assumptions used to make these boundaries, which are unlikely to completely bear out in reality. In particular, there is an assumption that the proportions highlighted in the Ofqual document are going to pretty much repeat from last year to this year; i.e. that the cohorts from Year 11 in 2016 and 2017 are pretty similar. In reality we are told that Year 11 2017 have slightly higher prior attainment than those in 2016 (although the published data does say that the two are not directly comparable). The other major assumption is that the proportions of grade 4 at Higher and Foundation will roughly match the proportions of grade Cs awarded at Higher and Foundation last year. This assumption is certainly unlikely to be true, we are already hearing that schools are entering significantly more pupils at Foundation tier (myself included compared to the proportion I used to enter in my previous schools), which is likely to raise the quality of candidate at both Foundation and Higher tier. If this is the case for the current mock data it would have the effect of lowering the Foundation boundaries (although they seem to fit too nicely for me to believe they will go lower - just a gut feeling though) and raising the Higher boundaries (which seems likely in reality).
• We mustn't forget that a lot can happen in the next 5 months, and I would expect most of the cohort to improve their scores; I would still expect the 9, 8 and 7 to be noticeably higher than these values in the summer, although I don't think the 4 boundary will shift up by as much as some people might think. In reality these boundaries are useful in the very specific circumstance that a pupil has completed all 3 papers from AQA practice set 3, and that they have done so after about a year and a bit to a year and half of GCSE course study.

So that is our story, up until about 2 or 3 hours ago. If it helps people then great; if you disagree then fine; if you use it and it turns out wrong, well you were warned...

Top tips for new department leaders

Inspired by the topic of today's #mathschat I started thinking about the top tips I would share with new department leaders (or that I do share when I support other department leaders) and I realised I would never fit them all in tweets, so I thought I would commit them to my blog and share that instead. So here in no particular order are my top tips for new department leaders:

1) Go for the quick staff win - People talk about the quick win in terms of data or school targets etc but for me the quick win I always looked for was something that showed staff I was working for them. Whether it was finding a way to reduce their workload, trying to tackle the behaviour of a particular pupil or class that is causing problems, or simply putting a simple protocol in place that makes staff feel more secure about how to handle a particular admin or department task, getting a positive impact for staff early on is a great way to start off your 'reign' on the right foot.

2) Do your research - there are huge volumes of research and writing about successful leadership. Detailed treatises on coaching and mentoring staff, and when particular staff may need which approach. The successful habits of 1000s of successful people have been analysed, dissected and then disseminated out. You won't be able to read all of it, but a lot of them say the same thing anyway; but do take the time to read some of it.

3) Set your boundaries - Your work load will increase, you know that anyway or you wouldn't have applied to be a department lead, but you do need time to break away from it. I never work on Friday's once I get home (unless I know I will be unable to work at the weekend and I have pressing things to do). I commute to work via train which only goes every hour on the half hour, so on Thursday (which tends to be my least busy day in terms of after school commitments) I ensure I get the half 4 train instead of the half 5. I do make sure to take some time on Saturday and Sunday as well, although this will sometimes be around planning or department admin commitments. The important thing is I have set a workload which I know is sustainable for me and allow me to stay effective.

4) Visit your staff - I don't just mean popping into lessons. Don't get me wrong popping into lessons is absolutely essential; it ensures your profile with pupils you don't teach is high (which can be invaluable if you have to work with them later in either a positive or negative context). Provided you use it to share good practice 'learning walking' can be a really powerful way to empower your staff; I always try to get something out of it that I ask a member of the department to email round or share. But I also mean at the end of a day, just spend 4 or 5 minutes in conversation with each or most of your staff members. I literally just pop in at the end of the day, ask about their day and listen for a few minutes - I try and get round them all but usually just hit most of them. If that means I start my after school work half an hour after everyone else so be it, but this human element is an invaluable time for me to connect with my department.

5) Bring it back to teaching and learning - You are taking on responsibilities that mean you spend less time in the classroom. Some of the people you are working with may want to do that to in time, some may already have done it and then stopped, some may never want to take that road. The one thing you all should (hopefully) share is a passion for teaching and learning. So when you do get time together as a team, try and spend as much time as possible with this as your focus. It can be tempted to get involved in data analysis, or setting or bogged down with admin that the school throws at you, but much of this can be done through email or at other times; if it is absolutely necessary set time limits so that you still have a good proportion of time for sharing practice or other T&L activities.

6) Manage the contradictions - Being a middle leader can sometimes feel like a contradiction. You have to support your team in getting the best outcomes, but you have to hold them to account for the outcomes as well. You have to ensure you help the school meets targets and at the same time try and take as much of the pressure of targets off of your team so they can focus on teaching and learning. You have to provide what your staff need to do their jobs, but you have to ensure you balance the budget. Recognise that these are not contradictions, but they are your power. You can help find the barriers to the outcomes and help solve them. You can manage the pressure that your staff feel so that it ensures they are properly focused without becoming overwhelming. You can work with your teams to ensure the best materials are provided and that all staff in your team use them effectively.

7) Develop and maintain your professional network - Not a week goes by when I don't have a professional conversation with someone outside my school. There will always be times when you need to run ideas or discuss thorny issues with a peer that is not invested in your institution. Having a strong professional network, be it through attending organised meeting, working with people online or just having friends in other schools you can meet in the pub (and preferably all three) can be crucial in developing your ideas.

8) Get staff working together - A lot of people talk about vision and communicating it. One of the most cringeworthy moments of my early career is getting my first team together and going through the powerpoint of my vision for the department. By all means have a vision, and by all means share it, but make it something that people want to get behind!

9) Don't be scared to delegate - A nice way to do this is to allow them to solve problems they come to you with. I had a member of staff who wanted to use tablets in his classroom more, but we only had 10 ipads and he wanted to broker a deal with the IT support department to get another department to buy our ipads at a reduced rate, and use the money to buy 20 cheaper nexus tablets. Rather than respond with "good idea, I will get right on that", my response was "great idea, can I get you to talk to IT and organise that?". It doesn't have to be delegating roles with labels (literacy rep, ICT rep, G&T rep et al) sometimes it is just about not taking a job from someone when they bring it forward.

10) Always acknowledge and reply - A lot of the communication these days is not face to face, emails in particular dominate most of it. I never leave a communication unanswered, even if it is just a response to acknowledge and thank them for the work they have done. Remembering to say thanks for all work done is important, and being consistent with it is equally important (no different to the kids in that aspect).