Did teaching a 2 or 3 year curriculum have the biggest impact on 2018 results?

Back to main blog

2. Did teaching a 2 or 3 year curriculum have the biggest impact on 2018 results?
This is quite a tough one to answer and again, the results need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Here I have compared the basic stability of 2018 results vs 2017 by the number of years spent teaching the course. The result is that a 2 year curriculum seems to have offered more stable results.

​To see if this was related to school type, I decided to break this down further and look at the impact of 2 or 3 year GCSE based on the STABLE higher, middle and lower brackets identified previously. Interestingly lower ability students seemed to benefit from a 2 year curriculum, with average and higher ability students showing a normal distributions. The 3 year curriculum was much more divisive, showing a negative correlation in average ability schools, a neutral one in higher ability, and a very split picture in lower ability schools. 

​When all schools are factored in (stable, rising and falling), the results suggest that in average and higher attaining schools, the 2-year KS4 curriculum offers a slightly more stable outcome. Whereas, in lower ability schools a 3-year KS4 curriculum shows a significantly negative impact (see below).

​Finally, I thought I would look at which specifications were most likely to be completed. Looking at this data, OCR B seemed to be completed most often and AQA the least, however there were few differences between the boards. 

​The picture was slightly worse when 2 year KS4 was filtered for. Here the gaps between the big three at 100% and 90% completion were larger. 

Takeaway: Although there are many reasons why a 3 year KS4 may not have worked well this year, there is a strong correlation between worsening results and the three year KS4 in lower attaining departments. This is definitely something to consider. In other settings, the value of a 3 year KS4 currently seems questionable, though of course these is no way of knowing what impact keeping a 2 year KS4 would have had. If you are sticking with 2 years, you may want to look at your spec options, or how you are spacing out the content.

Next Question

​Back to main blog