Hello everyone and thanks if you have filled in my History GCSE 2018 survey. If you are interested in insights from this kind of survey, it would be great if you could also take a moment to fill in the Historical Association Annual Survey. This helps the HA act as a voice for the profession more effectively. You can fill it in HERE.

In my last blog I used overview data to compare the GCSE results this year to last year, as well as looking at the grade boundaries for different boards. The survey data collected allows me to look more specifically at the results of departments. So for example, big data suggested that the proportion of grades was essentially similar to last year, but it was impossible to tell if this was because departments did the same, or because some did brilliantly and others appallingly.

In this blog I am going to try to pull out some answers to key questions I am hearing a lot on Twitter and Facebook. Please note that this data is only a sample of 363 schools, all of whom engage actively with social media, so the data is mostly suggesting things rather than proving anything. However, I did manage to get a broadly representative sample in terms of the distribution of data around the 65% 9-4 average. For more on the data set please see the end of the blog. If you'd like a fully anonymised copy for your very own, please do let me know.

As each post is quite long I have indexed the questions here:

1. Were results more or less stable in 2018 compared to 2017 - Read On Further
2. Did teaching a 2 or 3 year curriculum have the biggest impact on 2018 results?
3. What impact did exam question practise have on results?
4. Was the A*-A / 9-7 rate affected?
5. What impact did non-specialist teaching have on grade stability?

Conclusions

In lost of ways I am glad I cannot draw many clear conclusions from this data. The slight differences between results from 2017 to 2018 suggest that departments have not been unduly hit by these changes and these is a broad level of fairness in how they have occurred. While some departments clearly will not be pleased with their results (and others by turn delighted), this is not unusual in the picture of GCSE. The only slight impact here may be that departments who have been historically stable, are now in a category of less stable schools. However, to assess this, I would need data going back further, and probably in more depth.
What I do now have is  a large bank of data on the 2018 exams, so if anyone has a question they’d like me to investigate using the dataset I have, please do get in touch.


NOTE: For almost all of these explorations I have compared results in terms of stability. So for example 2018 stability is calculated by comparing a school’s results in 2018 with their results in 2017. If the results are in the same bracket, then I would consider them broadly stable. If their results this year were a bracket or more above last year e.g. last year they got 50-59% A*C and this year 60-69% 9-4, then they are consider as doing better, and the reverse if they are lower this year.


1. Were results more or less stable in 2018 compared to 2017?

Evening all. I hope you have all had a great summer and that results days have gone smoothly. 

Now the dust has begun to settle after yesterday's chaos, I thought I'd take a few minutes to outline five key things we found out about the new History GCSEs. OK, it's really four and a question, but hey ho!

1) Pupils this year did pretty much the same as last year overall
This is not really a surprise as Ofqual demanded a statistical tie between 2017 and 2018. Therefore almost the same proportion of kids got a G/1 or greater as last year, and the same for C/4 and A/7. 

There were some minor differences, but at a school cohort level of say 100 pupils, the difference would have been less than a single pupil missing out on a grade C/4.
Of course, this does not mean everyone’s results will have been stable. It is common with new specifications for some schools to do much better than normal and some to do much worse. This is usually because some schools manage to match what examiners were looking for more closely. It is almost impossible to second guess this precisely in the first year of a specification as examiners refine their expectations during first marking and grading discussions.

Takeaway lesson:
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Read the examiners’ reports closely and get some papers back if you were not happy with your overall results.

2) Your choice of board made almost no difference to overall grades (on average)
Discounting the statement at the end of the last point: because the boards all had to adhere to this basic rule when awarding grades, the differences between boards are also non-existent. If you look at the detail you will see that some boards did deviate from the 2017 figures, however this is because they have to take prior attainment into account. So, the reason that OCR A seem to have awarded more 4+ and 7+ grades would suggest that more high attaining pupils took these exams. By contrast OCR B probably awarded slightly fewer 4+ and 7+ grades due to a weaker cohort. This might imply that OCR centres chose their specification based on the ability range of their pupils (though this is pure speculation). AQA and Edexcel pretty much fit the Ofqual model, suggesting they had a broadly representative sample of pupils.