There will be three layers of quality assurance and checks carried out by the school before any grade/mark is submitted to the exam boards on 18th June.
Firstly, the Leader of each subject will have a full week after the May half term holiday to moderate and check EVERY grade submitted to them by their staff who teach Year 11. This will require each teacher to provide folders of evidence of how they came to the grade. This will then be used to confirm whether the grade is accurate and the evidence provided is robust and fair to the student. Remember, evidence will come from a range of sources; assessment results, December mock results, STEP assessment tracking data and actual student work (e.g. essays, filmed performance in drama, art portfolio, test paper, etc.).
Once this has been completed, the marks/grades are entered into our internal data system. This is never done in isolation.
The next layer of checks come from the Senior Leadership Team. The Line Manager for every subject area will meet with the Subject Leader and go through the grades that team has submitted, checking for any inconsistencies and asking the Subject Leader to go through their process of how the grades were awarded.
The third layer of quality assurance comes from the Head of the Centre, which is the Principal and Senior Leaders. EVERY STUDENT and EVERY GRADE from EVERY SUBJECT will be checked and gone through indivdually to look for anomolies or inconsistencies. Subject Leaders will be asked to go back and look at any grades where further clarity may be needed.
Every student will also have a hard copy evidence file, stored centrally in school. This file will contain the hard copies of evidence teachers have used to determine each grade. The file will contain a section for each subject a student studies, containing their evidence (e.g. test papers, essays, photographic evidence, mark sheets) relevant to each subject.
The final process is the actual submission and upload of the grades to the exam boards via their on-line platforms. This will be undertaken by the Exams Officer and over seen and assisted by the Senior Leader responsible.
As you are aware, due to the disruption to learning the pandemic has caused to all schools nationally, the DfE made the decision to scrap formal GCSE examinations this summer and allow schools to use their own evidence and assessment methods to determine GCSE grades.
