I promised in the post on a Lesson from 2002, to tell you about what happened when those pupils got to GCSE in 2005. They got tangled up in a grading anomaly which still affects us today.
Watching the video, I still remember the names of many of the pupils. Lots of them were in my form, and some of them really loved Spanish. One used to spend his summers at his dad's in Spain. Another took her Spanish exercise book on holiday so she could speak Spanish, but it got stolen in a distraction robbery in an airport carpark.
Their GCSE group was what we used to call mixed "ability". At the time, the number of Spanish entries was much lower and it tended to be a slightly more "elite" national cohort of pupils who had done well in French and chosen to take Spanish as a second foreign language.
It may have been as a result of the profile of the cohort, or it may have been because there was no attempt to ensure equality of standards across subjects, but standards were higher for Spanish.
The year this class took GCSE, it happened that the Head of Department was teaching French instead of Spanish. And the Head of French had a Spanish class. They both were surprised at the mis-match. The Head of Spanish found that she could enter for Higher Tier many more pupils for French than she was used to in Spanish. And the Head of French was similarly surprised that in Spanish pupils couldn't hit the thresholds for Higher Tier in Listening and Reading.
As they were discussing this, it turned out that you needed 22 for a grade C in French. And 39 for a grade C in Spanish. Of course, this could be to do with the difficulty of the paper. So I tried an experiment. I got my Spanish group to sit the French past paper (OCR Reading 2004). Of the pupils who had got a D on the Spanish mock, 50% managed to get a C in the French paper. And the others were much closer to a C than they were in Spanish. None of these pupils were doing GCSE French, and some had never done French at all.
As you can imagine I wrote to the board. Repeatedly. They eventually replied. Their letter said that the difference in grade boundaries was to "rectify poor performance of parts of the exam." This made no sense to me. It was distorting the results, not rectifying them. And since the discrepancy between the languages was a regular feature, it suggests the exams were regularly performing poorly.
The date is important. The years 2004-2005 were when GCSE in a language stopped being compulsory. And the exam boards did different things to decide how many of each grade should be given, as the profile of the cohort changed. This included distortions such as different grade boundaries for the Coursework in different languages, even though the marking criteria were identical. The same mark on a piece of writing got a different grade in different languages.
Some exam boards looked at the percentage of pupils at each grade. Some looked at overall numbers of grades. And at some point this became set in stone as the "correct" number of pupils getting each grade. With comparable outcomes, the number of pupils getting each grade is now set in advance. There are tweaks each year based on how the cohort did in maths and English in Year 6. But basically, the grades awarded hark back to the chaos that my pupils were mixed up in. The anomaly has become perpetuated, fossilised, set in stone.
To the extent that when we got the new GCSE a couple of years ago, the number of pupils getting each grade was transferred over from the old GCSE. So even before any teaching, before any exams, the numbers of pupils getting each grade was already set at a lower number than other subjects.
My anecdotes and experience match what FFT explain here about the historical situation. And here about the new GCSE. But when you see the video of their shiny little faces enjoying their Spanish in Year 8, unaware of what was to come...
If we get a new GCSE, whether it's an oddball phonicsvocabularygrammar one, or a cultureandcommunication one, whoever puts their heart and soul into it, is going to be pretty annoyed if before it's even been taught, it is set in stone that pupils will do worse than in other subjects.
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