Assessment – what does it mean to you? What does it mean to the student?

​There are three things to explore here:

1. Understanding the new assessment expectations
2. What assessment means for you in the classroom – ensuring that all students make progress (next post)
3. Checking learning – AfL: assessment for learning (next post)

The new GCSE grades, P8 & A8 - do you understand them?

​In this post we will be touching on the new assessment expectations and why you should care about them.

​We would not expect you to be learning about assessment in depth this early on in your course. However, you will be aware – because most staff-room conversation will be about this – that there have been big changes to the assessment and measurement structures for schools.

New GCSE grades?
P8? A8?
​What??

This post focuses on the new government assessment criteria for schools and how your understanding of this information impacts on your classroom! 

The reason you will need to understand the concept behind these changes is three-fold:

1. Your planning and delivery will need to ensure that ALL students are able to make progress.
2. You will need to start to explore what the success criteria is for certain levels and grades when you are teaching and marking.
3. Parents and students may want explanations of how they are now being graded. Although you will probably want to ask someone else to explain, I always think that understanding it yourself is quite confidence boosting! Just make sure you really understand before you start explaining to others!

Planning and delivery
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​At the moment in your lesson planning, you will mainly be focusing on what tasks you would like the students to carry out, and working hard on time management - hoping that you can fit all of your ideas into one lesson!

However, it is worth having at the back of your mind – to bring to the front at a later stage – how each task you set helps the students to make progress. 

Success criteria 
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​In schools, progress is measured in many ways, but ultimately it is calculated against nationally agreed levels and grades. It is worth looking at how other teachers match tasks with grades. For instance, they may be setting a piece of work to stretch their GCSE students to achieve a new grade 7 perhaps, or they will choose a grade 9 task which really challenges the students.

You will need to learn what tasks / questions / activities lead to which grades. Then you will need to be able to say whether the students have reached that grade or not.

​More importantly however you will not have a class who are all working towards one grade. Consequently, you will need to differentiate the tasks to enable all the students in front of you to be able to achieve. More of this later – but for now, start looking at how particular work matches certain grades.

​The new GCSE grading system, P8 & A8 – what do they actually mean?

I have found other people who explain these far better than I can, so have embedded two clips which I think are excellent: Progress 8 (explained in 3 minutes), and The New GCSE Grades (explained in 3 minutes)!

​So only 6 minutes of your time...

Next post – what assessment means for you in the classroom
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