This week's reflections
Results arrived on Thursday. Some students got exactly what they needed. Some did not. Almost all of them have spent the days since doing the same thing, which is measuring themselves against somebody else.
That is the first habit to drop.
A friend’s grade tells a student nothing about their own. It does not show how hard that friend worked, what they started with two years ago or what they were aiming at. Comparison feels like information. It is not. It just makes a good result feel less special and a bad result feel fatal!
On my mind this week
Almost every tutoring company has already told the world their A/A* percentage. I will publish ours once every student has sent their grade in. On its own, that figure tells a family very little. It could be 2 students that started with a grade 9 at GCSE and were always going to get an A*. 100% A* but not very meaningful. Be careful!
I started my teaching career in an inner London comprehensive. A comprehensive takes whoever arrives, so it gets judged on value added, which measures the distance a student travels between where they started and where they finished. It asks what the teaching added. Two students can finish on the same grade having started in completely different places. The grade looks identical. The teaching behind it does not.
Later I taught in a selective grammar school. Most of my classes arrived at the very top of the GCSE range and the A/A* figures looked superb. Those figures described who walked through the door in September. They said very little about what happened after that.
So when a company waves an A* rate at a family, the question to ask is more about what those students started with. Select a cohort at the top of the GCSE range and it will produce A*s whoever stands at the front. The percentage reads the same whether the teaching moved a student a long way or barely moved them at all.
Every student I teach can reach an A*. What that statistic cannot show is who did the work of getting them there.
Here is the number I care about most. Of the students we have heard back from, 92% secured their first choice university. That is what the whole thing exists for.
I say “heard back from” deliberately. Extracting grades from students and parents this week has been like getting blood out of a stone! Some of them took days to tell me they had got an A*.
The A* is not out of reach for anyone. What decides it is almost never ability. For most of our students it was not even the goal. They needed a specific grade for a specific course, they got it and they are going.
Some students fell short having done everything that was asked of them. Illness, a paper that went badly, a topic that came up in the worst possible form. That happens. The next paragraph is not about them.
For everyone else I will be straight, because nobody else will be. Most students believed they were doing enough work. They were not. We talked about habits and discipline all year and some decided that part did not apply to them. They sat in sessions waiting to be handed the answer instead of doing the work that turns a session into a grade. That was a choice.
Any student who recognises themselves in that will find it stings. I would rather it stung this week than have them spend another year believing the problem was the exam board.
Recognising it is also why it is fixable. If a result came down to what a student decided to do each week, then next time comes down to the same thing. The power sits with them. It always did.
Study Tip
Students should set their own target before September, measured against the course they want rather than against their friends.
- Write down the grade the chosen course actually asks for
- Write down the current position honestly, using real marks and not the ones told to friends
- Name the gap in grades
- Decide what happens every week to close it and put it in the diary as a fixed appointment
Then the sideways looking stops. The only comparison worth making is between where a student stands in September and where they stand in June.
For parents
The next fortnight brings a lot of other people’s results. They arrive at the school gate, in the family group chat and on social media. Your child is doing that maths already. Adding to it, even kindly, even with “so and so did brilliantly”, does not push them forward.
The work of getting the grade belongs to your child. That sounds harsh written down. It is the opposite. A student who believes the outcome rests on their own decisions has somewhere to go. A student who believes it rests on the school, the teacher, the exam board or luck has nowhere to go at all.
Your job is different from theirs. You provide the conditions, the routine, the food, the lift to school and the belief that they can change things. You cannot revise for them.
If this year did not go the way you hoped, the conversation to have is not about the grade. It is about what your child actually did in an average week between September and May. That conversation changes something. Discussing the mark scheme does not.
Quote of the week
“The important thing is not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment.”
Alfred Adler said that a long time before anyone invented a league table. A starting point is a fact What a student does from it is a decision.
