School Update - COVID 19 (Coronavirus) - 24/03/2020
General
With the new measures announced last night, we have decided to scale back the number of staff working in school to the bare minimum, whilst the remainder work from home. We are still open to those children who need to be looked after because their parents are keyworkers (etc) but we are discouraging all other visitors to school. If you need to contact the school for any reason please ring instead and we can discuss whether our help needs to be face-to-face or indeed can be achieved in another way. Many thanks.
Year 11 Parents
Following the decision to close schools and not go ahead with this summer’s exams, the government has announced more details of how grades will be awarded this summer. I know how keen you are to have some clarity, so this is what we’re being told at the moment:
- Regulators will develop and set out a process that will provide a calculated grade to each student which reflects their performance as fairly as possible, and will work with us and the other exam boards to ensure this is consistently applied for all students.
- Exam boards will be asking teachers, who know their students well, to submit their judgement about the grade that they believe the student would have received if exams had gone ahead.
- To produce this, teachers will be asked to take into account a range of evidence and data including performance on mock exams and non-exam assessment. Clear guidance on how to do this fairly and robustly will be provided to schools and colleges soon.
- Exam boards will then combine this information with other relevant data, including prior attainment, and use this information to produce a calculated grade for each student, which will be a best assessment of the work they have put in.
- Regulators and exam boards will be discussing with teachers’ representatives before finalising the approach, to ensure that it’s as fair as possible. More information will be provided as soon as possible.
- The aim is to provide these calculated grades to students before the end of July.
- These grades will be indistinguishable from those provided in other years.
- The exam boards will also aim to ensure that the distribution of grades follows a similar pattern to that in other years, so that this year’s students aren’t disadvantaged.
- Students will be able to appeal their grades if they don’t believe the right process has been followed.
- There will also be an option to sit exams early in the next academic year for any students who wish to – and students can also choose to sit exams next summer.
Schools are still waiting for the detail behind this plan, but when we are told we will be in touch. We understand this is an uncertain time for all, and naturally our Year 11 students will be concerned with how this will affect them and their entry into post-education education.
Given that so many of our students apply to the Shrewsbury College Group, we have been discussing with them about providing some transition work that students could do over the forthcoming months. The College has been very helpful and have agreed to signpost students to useful work they could be doing in preparation for their chosen courses in the very near future. We will communicate out on this when it’s in place.
The government’s latest announcement can be found here:
Regards and best wishes.