EN EL CASO QUE EL FONACOT ME OTORGUE LA ADJUDICACION ME OBLIGO EN NOMBRE DE MÍ REPRESENTADA A SUSCRIBIR EL CONTRATO QUE SE DERIVE, EN LOS TERMINOS, CONDICIONES Y PORCENTAJE ESTABLECIDOS EN ESTAS

6.1

School / Arena 1

School 1 is an 11-16 comprehensive, co-educational school formed from the merging of grammar and secondary modem schools some twenty years previous, in a town that has been economically deprived since the closure of its local mines. A significant number of teachers taught at the school when it was a grammar school with a tradition of entering high achieving students for GCE ‘O’ level a year earlier than normal. The banding, setting and grouping of students throughout Years 7 - 11 is complex and is described rather than summarised in a table.

Year 7 Grouping Rationale

Key Stage (KS) 2 SATs are the national tests taken by all students in the core subjects (English, mathematics and science) in the May of Year 6 (age 10-11 years old). The KS2 SATs’ results for these core subjects are used to produce an average score for each student who are then ranked and allocated to ‘mixed ability’ registration groups in that each group contains students with a variety of average SAT scores. However, for identifying teaching groups for subjects, the rank order is used to allocate students to three bands. The ‘top’ band is composed of students with the highest average SAT scores and the ‘lowest’ band, designated as ‘remedial’, is composed of students with the lowest rank order average SAT scores.

The Head of Science Department uses the KS2 Science SAT results to further rank order students to allocate each band of students to science teaching groups. This is to ensure that all the teaching groups within any band contain students with a range of results for KS2 Science. The top and middle bands contain respectively five and three teaching groups, and the whole of the

remedial band is allocated to one teaching group. All students in any band are timetabled for their science lessons at the same time, and each teaching group is arranged to be a ‘manageable ’ size.

A student’s science group placement is therefore dependent on their band allocation based on their average KS 2 SAT result. Furthermore, decisions made at a whole school level about the appropriate numbers of students for each band in any particular year dictate where band divisions are made. For a minority of students whose average SAT outcomes place them close to these

divisions it is not unreasonable to assume that their band allocations are arbitrary, being based more on what is deemed 'manageable ’ than on what SAT results might indicate about their potential. All Year 7 students are taught the same science curriculum consisting of separate lessons of biology, chemistry and physics from the commercial scheme, ‘Science Now’. The top band is traditionally made larger than the middle band so that within staffing, accommodation and curriculum constraints, 'the maximum possible number of students access to the learning opportunities associated with the top bandfor all subjects'. Science teaching groups in the top band are also consistently larger in student numbers than those in the middle band. The School’s rank ordering practice results in more girls than boys being placed in the upper band and more boys than girls in the middle band for Year 7. One might speculate that this is due to the girls’ better performance in English SATs having a weighting effect.

The Science Department’s policy is to use tests from the ‘Science Now’ scheme for

assessing upper and middle band Year 7 students ‘because the content o f these tests is referenced to SAT tiers and levels ’. This enables the Department to report students’ progress in accordance with whole school policy with reference to SAT levels, and to have a predictive SAT level for each student for tier entry decisions in the Key Stage 3 Science SATs in Year 9. The ‘Science Now’ Year 7 tests have a common core of items and they are also differentiated using other items to form tiers of test papers that are equivalent to specific SAT levels. Top band Year 7 students do a tier of these tests giving them access to SAT levels 5 and 4, whilst middle band students only do a tier of tests which gives them access to SAT levels 4 and 3. The science teachers write tests for assessing students in the remedial band, which has just one group of students. These tests do not necessarily always reference to SAT levels. For the majority of Year 7 students, a preoccupation with SAT levels and associated levels of performance dominate School l ’s assessment practice and views of students’ progress in science.

Student movements between Year 7 upper and middle bands occur once, half way through the school year. The movements are based on the rank ordering of the ‘Science Now’ test results, and the test results from the other core subjects, mathematics and English. It is not possible to move a student to a different band for just one subject. As in the case of movements between bands, timetabling constrains students’ movements between science teaching groups within bands.

No record of the extent of student movement between and within bands in Year 7 was made available to me.

Year 8 and Year 9 Grouping Rationale

Comments on the Year 8 and 9 groupings are from Paul. In Year 8 students may opt to take a second foreign language (German). The students opting to do so form one band (German band) and the remainder form another two bands (non-German bands), the smaller of which is designated as ‘remedial’. The German band and the larger of the non-German band of students are each divided into science teaching groups based on their ‘Science Now’ Year 7 common core test results. These science teaching groups are referred to as ‘sets’ because they are differentiated - for each band, students with the highest test results are allocated to the ‘top’ set, and so on down to the ‘bottom’ set containing students who performed least well in the tests. In practice students in the ‘top’ set of the German band and those in the ‘top’ set of the non-German band are not comparable in terms of their attained science SAT level profile. There is a preponderance of girls in the top science sets in both the German and non-German bands.

The KS 3 SAT is the national science test taken by students in May of Year 9. The sets within each Year 8 band are associated with a particular tier of the national SAT science papers. All sets follow the same course but pitched at different levels, for example at SAT level 6 for middle sets and SAT level 7 and extension for top sets. Movement of students between the German and non-German bands in Year 8 rarely occurs and when it does, it is largely for social reasons. Movement of students between sets within a band in Year 8 occurs once and usually at a time no later than half way through the school year. Such movements occur to enable all students within a particular set to be aiming for the same tier of the national KS3 SAT papers. The number of students in the top sets in both bands is kept deliberately high to enable as many students as possible to be entered for the higher tier of SAT paper. Nevertheless, student numbers is an issue for class management and whenever a student is moved up into a higher set, usually a student is also moved down from that set. The same banding and science setting systems operate in Year 9 as in Year 8. The vast majority of students remain in the same bands and science teaching sets

Year 9 students sit a mock SAT to confirm their KS3 SAT tier entry. As a result 'a few ’ students do not sit the same tier as the rest of their set members. Records show ‘that more o f the sets in the German band than the non-German band are enteredfor the higher tier ofKS3 SAT science test paper ’ and that over time they consistently achieve higher KS3 SAT results than the non-German band students. The allocation of a student to a science set and to a KS3 SAT tier is based on their average performance across science subjects. Again no account is taken of differential performance in biology, chemistry and physics.

Year 10 GCSE Grouping Rationale

A student’s performance in the separate science disciplines only becomes an issue for group allocation when GCSE science course decisions need to be made in Year 9 for Year 10. Students commit themselves to their Year 10 courses and timetabling arrangements are in place before the KS3 Science SAT results are available. The School analyses the KS3 SAT science results into their biology, chemistry and physics components for each student. These are used both to inform and justify teachers’ allocation of students to Year 10 science courses. For example, parents wishing their child to take Triple Award GCSE Science are given the KS3 SAT physics score to advise them to enter their child for Double Award GCSE science when they are unlikely to achieve at least a grade C on the Triple Award GCSE physics examinations. The rationale for this advice is a poor performance in any one of the science disciplines is subsumed within an average score from all three science disciplines in Double Award GCSE.

Students rarely follow courses other than those advised by their science teachers. Rare contrary instances occur when parent’s wishes rather than student’s wishes go against this advice. Then the school agrees to enter the student for the parent’s chosen course but continues to monitor the student’s progress and offer advice to the parents about what is best for their child. The science KS3 SAT analysis outcomes are used to guide students who may be undecided about taking up their chosen science courses at the start of Year 10. Notably, at the end of Year 9 proportionally fewer girls than boys in the top sets of the Year 8 bands opt for the Triple Award GCSE Science course. Usually all students in the remedial band of Year 9 only follow courses leading to the Certificate of Education (CoEA) in Years 10 and 11.