A Level Exam Results - School Specific?

**curlywurly**

Tigster - you read my mind. I wld ask them to give it voluntarily otherwise, look at Tigster's link, and put in an FOI request. The worst that can happen is that you are in the same position as you are now.

patchwork_cat

Tigsteroonie wrote: »

Could the school itself be obliged to supply this data under a Freedom of Information Act request?

I honestly don't know, it's just a thought that entered my head.

Good call.

I would recommend that bearing in mind only a couple of weeks to resit that you get a board specific book from Amazon. My son has these because they may just mention something that he didn't know or missed when the told teacher them.

throughtherain

I doubt you'd be able to prove much even if the results were poor. I teach two classes of students the same A-level module and one class is on track for all As and Bs, the other is on track for Ds, Es and Us. Have I taught significantly poorer in the second class? Of course not - the ability of the students is much lower and so of course they will achieve lower results. If you had data about previous attainment for each student in the class, and relate this to their current rate of progress, you might be able to make a point. But it would be against Data Protection Act to give out this sort of information, unless perhaps it was anonymised. Even if you had this, you'd have to benchmark this class's attainment against a similar class and use that to show that this teacher is producing lower results. But that is next to impossible, since each student and each cohort of students is unique.

I appreciate your situation and find poor teachers frustrating too, but I don't think you will be able to do anything with this data even if you had it.

Have you asked to discuss the situation with the Head of Department or Headteacher face-to-face and in-depth? This might be more effective than trying to prove to them they're not doing their jobs properly.

What exactly is it that you suspect this teacher is doing wrong? Is their subject knowledge poor? Do they not mark work? Maybe if you can explain what the teacher is not doing that they should be you might have more success.

Tigsteroonie

An aside:

I remember when I was 13, I got around 35% in the annual Geography exam. We'd had a new teacher that year, and he was completely useless at teaching his subject and managing the class. Nobody in my class scored above 40%, we were the top stream and results in other subjects were all 70% upwards.

My mother marched down to the school on Parents Evening and really laid into the Headmaster for employing such a useless waste of space. She argued that the results in other subjects showed that it wasn't the pupils at fault, it was the teacher. Funnily enough, and probably completely unrelated, he didn't return to our school the following year.

nxdmsandkaskdjaqd

throughtherain wrote: »

I doubt you'd be able to prove much even if the results were poor. I teach two classes of students the same A-level module and one class is on track for all As and Bs, the other is on track for Ds, Es and Us. Have I taught significantly poorer in the second class? Of course not - the ability of the students is much lower and so of course they will achieve lower results. If you had data about previous attainment for each student in the class, and relate this to their current rate of progress, you might be able to make a point. But it would be against Data Protection Act to give out this sort of information, unless perhaps it was anonymised. Even if you had this, you'd have to benchmark this class's attainment against a similar class and use that to show that this teacher is producing lower results. But that is next to impossible, since each student and each cohort of students is unique.

I appreciate your situation and find poor teachers frustrating too, but I don't think you will be able to do anything with this data even if you had it.

Have you asked to discuss the situation with the Head of Department or Headteacher face-to-face and in-depth? This might be more effective than trying to prove to them they're not doing their jobs properly.

What exactly is it that you suspect this teacher is doing wrong? Is their subject knowledge poor? Do they not mark work? Maybe if you can explain what the teacher is not doing that they should be you might have more success.

Thank you for your words of support and ideas. The school has the shutters up, therefore any discussion is not going to happen.

Based on a previous comment, I think I am going to have to be carefull what I say on here.

melancholly

right now, i'd concentrate on helping your child to study and do as well as possible. even if the teacher is rubbish, the most important outcome is for your child to do as well as possible. i think the idea of course specific textbooks is a great one as is getting a copy of the syllabus to check against for revision.

if there is a genuine problem, then the results will make it obvious to any internal review and i can't imagine the school completely ignoring it (especially with the number of capable unemployed teachers at the moment!). i can see why they wouldn't want to hang a teacher out to dry in public but i can't see them not doing anything to deal with it.

jazabelle

It isn't always the pupils. We had a really good Religious Education teacher, so I opted to take it at GCSE. At the beginning of year 10 she went on long term sick leave, and the cover teacher they got was appalling. He wasn't there most days, he had no knowledge of the subject or papers. He put unrelated vidoes on most days. Our class was okay, but with no teaching the highest grade was an E. We didn't have a clue how to teach ourselves, or what we were even meant to be doing.

Seeing a class that did fine in all other subjects, but ended up with Ds and Es in that class surely showed there was a problem with the teachers.

gratefulforhelp_2

I am pretty sure you can make a FOI request for this data.

* health warning ?* what is key is not just the raw results, but also the GCSE results of the class, and to a certain extent, their level of social deprivation, or otherwise.

There will also be a difference in expectations of final grade according to the subject.

anguk

I had something similar with my DD's 6th form, in one subject all of the class got very poor, unexpected results in February's exam, yet another class studying the same subject with a different teacher got expected grades. There have been complaints made about the teacher but it was only when 75% of his class actually dropped out that something was done. The pupils who dropped out were asked by the head of year for their reasons, the pupils who have remained still have the same teacher but are now getting additional help. It will be interesting to see what the next exam results are and if the teacher is still there next year.

nxdmsandkaskdjaqd

I have now made a Freedom of Information act request to the school, we now await their feedback.

Also I have made a request of the exam board, just to see what they can deliver.