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Exam results will look different, ESC warns

Exam results will look different, ESC warns

Monday 29 July 2024

Exam results will look different, ESC warns

Monday 29 July 2024


With this year's GCSE results due out in just over three weeks, Education are urging everyone to look at them fairly and not compare this year's grades to previous ones.

Until last year, Guernsey had a Grammar School and three High Schools - with students given a secondary school place based on their attainment level in the 11+ exam.

The three colleges also previously had scholarship places awarded through the 11+.

With the 11+ being discontinued in 2018, the students sitting their GCSE exams at the island's States-run secondary schools earlier this year were the first fully comprehensive cohort.

The Director of Education, Nick Hynes said even though staff don't yet know what the results are - they do know they will look different to previous years, and they want to continue to celebrate the individual successes which will have been achieved.

"Comparisons with previous years are not necessarily going to be valid, because not only will we no longer have a set of Grammar School results, we'll have a set of Les Varendes High School results, and to compare the two is completely nonsensical," he said.

"You'd be comparing a Grammar School year from last year to a High School year this year, and likewise there's obviously a greater spread of higher ability students across the whole of our high schools. So, not only is Les Varendes a non-selective High School, so is Les Beaucamps, La Mare de Carteret, and St Sampson's are also non selective, so they also have a different cohort.

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Pictured: The 11+ ended in 2018, with this year seeing the first fully non-selective cohort sitting their GCSEs across the island's High Schools.

"So comparison from year on year with schools is going to be less than useful. However, comparison with the whole Bailiwick and Secondary School Partnership last year to this year would be appropriate."

The Executive Principal of the Secondary School Partnership said whatever results are awarded this summer, she knows that the students have worked hard - as have their teachers.

Liz Coffey said that has been an overriding positive she has seen throughout the years of instability that education services locally have faced since she's been in post, first starting as Principal of Grammar.

"Teachers focus in on their children, they really do," she said. "We know that individual teachers do their very best in every class that they teach. But overall, instability in system, it hasn't helped us.

"It really hasn't helped us for a decade of, not just the phasing out of selection, but which model and which schools were we going to have and which are going to be closed, and all of that. It produced a feeling of instability and unrest which day in, day out, it does influence things."

Ms Coffey said luckily that period of instability is now ending, and with a fully comprehensive system across our high schools, Guernsey's students and their teachers are a lot more settled.

"Staff now know where they're at in that new structure, and that just brings a sense of relief, understandably, for them," she said. "And then you can really start building on, and trying to make your own improvements, which we will all share.

"We don't want things just to be 'good enough'. We want them to be really brilliant, because our kids really deserve that."

This year's Level 2 results - which will include BTECs and other vocational qualifications as well as GCSEs - are due out on Thursday 22 August.

"It's about celebrating all of those young people's achievements, whether they managed to get a grade four or whether they managed to get grade twos, because success for each individual child looks different," said Mr Hynes.

"The success that some children attain, whilst it might not be grade four, is significant for them, and what we want to try and avoid is, 'if you didn't get a grade four, you failed', because you haven't. Your starting point may look different from other people."

Pictured top: Nick Hynes and Liz Coffey.

READ MORE...

Island-wide GCSE results better than first reported

GCSE grades should be celebrated

Covid disruption "undoubtedly" a factor in GCSE results

New GCSE grades: how do they work?

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