Imagine you are selling petrol for £1.40 a litre, and the other garages down the street all sell it for £1.30. Should you be surprised or confused that your garage is less popular than the others? That's what's happening in Modern Languages at GCSE.
That could be the post, right there, with no further explanation needed. It's obviously going to have an effect. But what exactly are the mechanisms involved? Why are lower grades given out in languages? And how does it filter through to pupils' decisions?
If anyone suggests that it's because teaching and learning in languages is worse than in other subjects, you can tell them straight away that that is false. No such calibration has been made. In fact, grades are not calibrated one subject to another. That's the problem. Ofqual have looked at grading in languages and confirmed that it is unfair. But their legal brief is to keep it that way. Because the calibration that is made, is to perpetuate grading within the subject year on year.
This was most famously set up in advance when we moved to a new GCSE in 2018. The unfair grading of the old GCSE was carefully and deliberately transferred across to the new GCSE. So pupils taking the new course and the new exam, even though it was proposed to be a better course and a better exam, had no chance of showing they could get better grades.
And where under the old A-G grading system, the difference between languages and other subjects had been around half a grade, with the new 9-1 grading, the difference in the key area of grades 4 and above, was now stretched to a whole grade, because of the way the old grades were mapped onto the new ones.
How do pupils find out about this to inform their options choices? One way is through the outcomes of older pupils, friends, siblings. On average, they will have been given a grade lower in a language than in their other subjects. This will not have gone unnoticed. This will come back to bite us later.
It puts teachers in an invidious situation. We could explain that this has nothing to do with the pupils and the standard they personally have achieved. We could explain that where a grade 6 is given out in another subject, you can expect to be given a 5 in languages. This would be like having a huge sign announcing our petrol at £1.40. We can't stand up in assembly and say, "If you pick a language, you'll get a lower grade, but it's just how the grades are given out." You don't get customers by saying "Buy our petrol. It's 7.69% more than everywhere else."
So we keep quiet and pretend taking an MFL in GCSE isn't going to cost you. We cover up the sign with the prices on and put up some posters stressing the high value of our petrol.
But...
Pupils are given targets. Sometimes from Year 7. Sometimes in Year 9 when they are thinking about their options. Maybe throughout KS3 and KS4 these targets are used to report on whether the pupils are "on track" or not with their learning. And these targets will be lower in Languages than in other subjects.
Why? Because the targets accurately reflect the fact that lower grades are given out in languages. They are a statistical calculation of what a pupil who got those SATs results typically goes on to get at GCSE. And in languages, for grades 4 and above, this would be a grade lower.
So pupils come to us with their lower targets and they ask, "Why is my target lower for French?" What do we say? We do NOT, as we have already seen with our petrol price analogy, tell them that it is a true reflection of the fact that lower grades on average are given out in languages. If you can't see why we don't tell them that, don't go into the petrol retail business.
We have to be quite clever and say, "Don't worry about the targets. It's based on your maths and English results in the SATs in Year 6. It's nothing to do with how good you are at languages. And the target doesn't mean you can't get a higher grade." And quite rightly the pupil can immediately see that their maths and English grade years ago, cannot possibly be relevant to their language GCSE result.
Except of course, the target IS relevant. It is a true reflection, not of the pupils' ability in languages, but of the fact that lower grades are given out. It's a confidence trick that we just played. We told the pupils that it couldn't be relevant. When in fact it's giving them very accurate and important information. So although nothing we said was untrue, and we said it because we think choosing a language is worthwhile, we did commit an act of deception.
Then of course, on average, that pupil goes on to get... a grade lower in French than in their other subjects. The word "on average" makes things worse. Because if a pupil does manage to get the same grade, it means another pupil is getting 2 grades lower. And if a pupil (maybe a native speaker) gets a higher grade in languages than in their other subjects, then somewhere another pupil has to be getting 3 or more grades lower. But let's stick to the "average" picture of it being a grade lower. For every single pupil for grade 4 and above. That doesn't go unnoticed.
Which is where it comes back to bite us. The deception is revealed. We said the target grade wasn't a reflection of their ability or their learning in languages. We said it wouldn't limit their grade. But on average it very noticeably does. We hid the sign with the price on. We let them fill up the tank. And then at the checkout, we hit them with £1.40 a litre when they could have got £1.30 everywhere else.
What conclusions do they draw? If they swallowed the message that the target was meaningless, then their lower grade must mean: they are bad at languages, languages is hard, the teaching wasn't good enough. And yes, this is the reputation that we have. What is the only way out? To admit that we deceived them? That we twisted our words to make it sound as if the target wasn't indicative of anything?
Of course we did it with the best of intentions. Because we thought studying a language was something they "should" be doing. Or because we are under pressure because our results look bad and our numbers are falling, so frankly, we'll say anything. Except the truth, of course. Because if we did that we would have no customers. And there's a slow degradation that comes with having to live a life of deception.
Right. You probably need an antidote. Try this post from yesterday on a New Hope!
Need to check the facts? FFT datalab is a great place to start for the details of unfair grading. This page takes you through recent unfair grading.
This graph on this page shows how above a grade 3, the gap with history widens to a whole grade.
Or this page to see how many decades back this goes and how it is an unfortunate historical anomaly, not a calculated calibration.
Here's a post on my blog on the targets pupils are given, showing how stark the unfair grading is and how the gap widens at grade 4 and above.
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