politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Labour seems to have forgotten how to ‘do’ Opposition

MarqueeMark said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

MarqueeMark said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

I'm not eating a pizza with pineapple on it after this test match.

You owe me, big time.....

Thank you but I'd rather England won the test match.

Nah, just back to being a contest again.... A hot day in England, a test match on the radio that is finely balanced - luxury....

ydoethur said:

another_richard said:

malcolmg said:

another_richard said:

malcolmg said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

You'd better hope that English teachers haven't exposed themselves as cheats and liars by vastly over predicting grades as their Scottish counterparts did.

Our local education expert opines that teachers are cheats and liars, you could not make it up. Good old another richardhead

Perhaps you could compare the grades Scottish teachers predicted with what had been achieved in previous years ?

And if you'd thought instead of switching automatically into abuse you would see I have backed the action of the Scottish government in lowering those predicted grades.

Well I don't support them , why ask teachers to do it and then make them out to be cheats and liars by making up another system to trash the teachers opinions.
I would be less than happy if I was a teacher for sure and you calling Scottish teachers liars and cheats deserves abuse that I would get banned for.

Nation 5
2016-2019 average 78.6%
2020 actual after lowering 81.1%
2020 teacher predicted 88.6%

Higher
2016-2019 average 76.5%
2020 actual after lowering 78.9%
2020 teacher predicted 88.8%

Advanced Higher
2016-2019 average 80.4%
2020 actual after lowering 84.9%
2020 teacher predicted 92.8%

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296

Its the Scottish government who has done a better job than the teachers.

By assigning numbers based on parental wealth?

CorrectHorseBattery said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

another_richard said:

malcolmg said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

You'd better hope that English teachers haven't exposed themselves as cheats and liars by vastly over predicting grades as their Scottish counterparts did.

Our local education expert opines that teachers are cheats and liars, you could not make it up. Good old another richardhead

Perhaps you could compare the grades Scottish teachers predicted with what had been achieved in previous years ?

And if you'd thought instead of switching automatically into abuse you would see I have backed the action of the Scottish government in lowering those predicted grades.

So you were also happy with them raising a significant number of grades based on a mathematical model from a 23 year old research paper?

They can do what what they have to, its not an easy situation.

But the incessant self-serving whine ** from teachers does not impress.

Especially after they have exposed themselves as cheats and liars by massively over predicting grades.

Now I'm sure that you will say that you personally do not over-predict grades.

In which case that should make you direct your abuse at the many teachers who do.

** Reminiscent of the incessant self-serving whine in 2012 when 20+ years of grade inflation was brought to an end.

So you’re quite happy about poor children being clobbered by an algorithm that isn’t valid run by a bunch of failed civil servants who have repeatedly demonstrated over many years they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re doing?

How very revealing.

Again, though, you miss the point, possibly wilfully, that they have only used data from teachers in a small minority of cases. So your criticism doesn’t even work.

Stop frothing, you're not in class now.

I'm no more a supporter of the education bureaucracy than I am of other government bureaucracies.

But let me ask you a question.

Given that last year over 97% of A levels were passes and over 25% were A grades what do you think this year's results should and will be.

OK, I will answer.

My very distinct impression, and this impression is backed by a number of conversations I have had, is that this year‘s cohort were rather abler than last year’s. Last year, I had around 25% at 7+. Given the quality of the students I had, and the quality of my own teaching, that would normally be nearer 50%. Anecdotal I know, but there was reason to expect a rise before the pandemic hit.

That is compounded by the fact that teachers have now a little time to get used to the new exams, and the marking criteria has finally stabilised. So the delivery of the courses has improved substantially.

So it doesn’t surprise me that grades were up 10% on teacher predictions than on last year. In fact, it suggests that probably they were quite realistic.

Unless we had ten to fifteen years of data to draw on, it’s not possible to model out background noise. That’s what they’ve tried to do and that’s what’s going to get them into trouble.

You might argue, with some justice, that DfE requirements and the cowardice of Gove mean that grades are normally standardised from year to year anyway. True to an extent. But that would only be valid if you could expect the school cohorts to be exactly consistent from year to year, which is clearly a nonsense. Otherwise, you would expect abler students in the cohort to attend different schools so there could be very wide variation from year to year. This method has put in place a wallet lottery.

Does that answer your question?

No it doesn't - how about you give some numbers so we can compare with what actually happens.

Unless Darwin has kicked up a couple of gears then an 'abler cohort' should change things by about 0.1%.

Some schools will do much better than that while others do the opposite.

Amazing though that this 'abler cohort' came through this year.

Perhaps you can inform us which other years had a 10% increase in grades because of an 'abler cohort' or a 10% fall in grades because of a less able cohort.

I'd sure love to know which years were those of genius or stupidity.

Why you so angry bruh

CorrectHorseBattery said:

I wonder what the 2019 GE result would have been if Labour had never backed a second referendum but Corbyn had stayed on. Much the same I think

CorrectHorseBattery said:

I wonder what the 2019 GE result would have been if Labour had never backed a second referendum but Corbyn had stayed on. Much the same I think

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Mexicanpete said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

I wonder what the 2019 GE result would have been if Labour had never backed a second referendum but Corbyn had stayed on. Much the same I think

The disdain was for Corbyn not the second referendum. Many former Remainers supported Johnson, only because he wasn't Corbyn.

For a change I am not entirely sure I agree with David Herdson's thread header.

People like to attack Starmer for Labour's Brexit policy but he wanted Labour to back Remain and I am under no doubt if he was the leader and had run on that, they would have done better

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

Thank you.

If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?

At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.

How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’

It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.

Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?

ClippP said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

Thank you.

If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?

At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.

How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’

It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.

Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?

Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.

You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.

In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.

I think there is some special pleading going on...

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

kinabalu said:

Just read the Header and I strongly agree.

Labour need to start building the narrative that Boris "Boris" Johnson is a vacuous lump of poshboy privilege who is utterly clueless at anything other than self-promotion and that his breezy insouciant incompetence in this time of great national crisis is taking a terrible toll in lives and livelihoods.

Cometh the hour cometh the clown.

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

OldKingCole said:

kinabalu said:

MJW said:

kle4 said:

My browser for some reason recommened an article from a website I'd never heard of before, which had a rather peculiar premise about 'How Corbyn unmasked comedy'.

It seems to be saying tha anti-establishmentism is the key to comedy, and because some famous comedians and comedy programmes disliked Corbyn or did such things as 'blamed Corbyn for Johnson’s victory without taking responsibility for helping Johnson establish his harmless clown persona', that means they were on the same side as 'the establisment'. It calls out Charlie Brooker for a bit on the Corbyn-Branson row which apparently included far more time attacking Corbyn than Branson and didn't consider corporate interests (that Corbyn was indeed wrong about what he claimed I guess is not of relevance).

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/how-corbyn-unmasked-comedy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

Blaming Corbyn for losing an election? Perish the thought. Apparently comedians are are supposed to be political radicals at all times. It's silly of political conservatives to moan that there's too much left wing comedy out there, without Corbynites also now suggesting the comedy establishment is not doing its job because they mocked the great man. (Ed M didn't get it easy either of course).

Onthe other hand, the article itself was therefore of great comedic value.

As we are seeing with the laughable conspiracies around the 'Labour Report' one of the key problems with Corbynism is that it has no safety valve of self-doubt or ability to admit its own failings, as it is predicated on the man and his supporters being uniquely virtuous. Otherwise, what is the point? If you admit nuance and the validity of different views as reasonably held and having their merits within Labour's tradition, why put forward someone the public hate, who even he would admit isn't exactly a natural in the role of leader? Why put up with the ossuary he hangs his clothes in or evidence of managerial incompetence? It only makes sense if he and you have hit upon something uniquely virtuous and everyone else is a nefarious Blairite/Tory acting out of venality and malice.

So comedians must be to blame, not Corbyn. Or Jews. Or Labour officials. Or Laura Kuenssberg, Countdown hosts, anyone who doesn't see the unique virtues of the man or his words must be a bad actor. It's a cultish creed Labour need to stamp out and quarantine itself from as it's just so dangerous - not initially as they have power over very little and are reduced to attacking minor celebrities - but as it rots the brain and would cause huge problems were it to be over something serious where errors had been made it was impossible to reasonably course correct without blaming some conspiracy.

Thank you for this entertaining mix of projection and amateur psychiatry. Now here is what actually happened and why -

In 2015 in a climate favourable to re-election the party suppressed its radicalism - in both content and messaging - for fear of being rogered by the tory press and (linked) of spooking the denizens of Middle England.

Result - a Conservative majority government. Reaction - Fuck it then. Let's stop poncing around. Let's drop the timidity. It's sterile and it's getting us nowhere in any case. We'll shift left. Elect a properly socialist leader and run on a radical platform. No apologies for it. Give the voters the choice and see what happens.

What did happen? - Another loss but close and a better performance than achieved under the previous 2 leaders. And this despite Jeremy Corbyn being a sub-optimal PM candidate on a personal level (deficiency of brain power).

Moral - The left nearly won a GE with a poor leader. With better packaging we can do so one day soon.

Labour didn't lose the 2015 election, particularly in England. They actually had a net gain IN ENGLAND of 4 seats. It was the collapse of the LD's, significantly, but by no means exclusively to the Tories, that put Cameron back in No 10, albeit with a small overall majority than the Coalition had had. It was the rise in the SNP vote that did for Labour.
Milliband should have stayed as leader.

I liked - and like - him but I think he had to go. That 2015 result was such a terrible blow.

EdM's problem was that he never seemed interested beyond the 'ordinary people' of Dartmouth Park. Or as I think Sandy described it 'talking to the top 10% about the bottom 10%'.

Now if only there had been some intelligent lefty who had come from the North but now lived in Hampstead who could have taken EdM to the restaurant in BHS Doncaster then things might have been different.

lol - as if.

But seriously, he was demonized as "geeky" and "red ed" and "wimpy" and all of that, total nonsense, but it seeped in - as your comment testifies. A shame. Would have been a good PM probably. But all substance no style is the very opposite of what we seem to value these days - e.g. the ghastly "Boris".

But I think EdM lacked substance as well.

Or perhaps more generally lacked interest in or empathy towards or relevance to the average person in the average constituency.

Nor was he a skilled enough politician (or dishonest enough person) to be able to fake it.

He was, I suspect, someone who had suffered by being given too much and too much too soon without having to learn and experience things himself.

It's possible you arrived at this perception uninfluenced by the barrage of media messaging along exactly these lines but I am skeptical. EM was by any measure less silver-spooned than the man he ran against and the man in number 10 now. Both of them are the epitome of what you describe in the last para.

But Cameron and Boris were more talented/dishonest as politicians

As was Blair before him.

So he lacked the style and he lacked the substance which Thatcher or Brown revelled in.

Nor did he have the 'everyman' appeal which Major had.

Is insipid the best description of EdM ?

Many in Labour must have thought and so the turn to Corbyn.

eek said:

ydoethur said:

ClippP said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

Thank you.

If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?

At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.

How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’

It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.

Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?

Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.

You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.

In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.

I think there is some special pleading going on...

To come up with my grades, I had to do the following.

1) Collate them from the subject heads.

2) Check them against mocks.

3) Check the mocks against the exams from last year

4) if that was all in order, check against baseline grades to see if they were widely out and whether there might be reasons for that

5) Feed back to the relevant SLT member

6) Discuss the materials with her, including going over papers.

7) Meet with her and the principal to agree final grades.

And yes, changes did get made, some up, some down.

Obviously this will have varied from school to school.

But I am happy that my grades were realistic. Yes, they were better than last year, when I had a weak cohort, because I had a strong one. And that was confirmed by baseline data.

I now find that some fat lazy twit in London doesn’t agree and so my students, whom I have worked with for years, will be graded on the basis of a computer model using data that isn’t valid. So that process lasting six weeks when I was also trying to teach online lessons was so much wasted effort.

Anyone who thinks I have no reason to be angry can go fuck themselves. These people making these decisions care only about their worthless careers, and are ruining children’s lives to protect them.

And that is still not to deny it was a stupid process to start, as I have said so many times. At the very least, I should have been asked to submit part of my evidence base. But the mere fact these mindless twats screwed up ab initio and are now screwing up further doesn’t let them off the fact that they have demonstrated total unfitness for office and need to be sacked.

Are you talking about GCSE or A level results?

Foxy said:

another_richard said:

malcolmg said:

another_richard said:

malcolmg said:

another_richard said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

You'd better hope that English teachers haven't exposed themselves as cheats and liars by vastly over predicting grades as their Scottish counterparts did.

Our local education expert opines that teachers are cheats and liars, you could not make it up. Good old another richardhead

Perhaps you could compare the grades Scottish teachers predicted with what had been achieved in previous years ?

And if you'd thought instead of switching automatically into abuse you would see I have backed the action of the Scottish government in lowering those predicted grades.

Well I don't support them , why ask teachers to do it and then make them out to be cheats and liars by making up another system to trash the teachers opinions.
I would be less than happy if I was a teacher for sure and you calling Scottish teachers liars and cheats deserves abuse that I would get banned for.

Nation 5
2016-2019 average 78.6%
2020 actual after lowering 81.1%
2020 teacher predicted 88.6%

Higher
2016-2019 average 76.5%
2020 actual after lowering 78.9%
2020 teacher predicted 88.8%

Advanced Higher
2016-2019 average 80.4%
2020 actual after lowering 84.9%
2020 teacher predicted 92.8%

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296

Its the Scottish government who has done a better job than the teachers.

I find that a rather curious sort of logic, and quite authoritarian. In principle because of the size of the cohort, marks should be overall broadly consistent from year to year.

It is on the individual basis that the injustice will be done. This will be the bright undergraded pupil missing marks and not getting a Uni place, and someone else marked up getting it instead, and perhaps struggling on the course as a result.

After all, I could allocate candidates the same proportions of grades as last year by rolling dice. The proportions would match and job done. The point of examinations though is to base the marks on individual efforts.

ydoethur said:

ClippP said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

Thank you.

If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?

At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.

How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’

It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.

Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?

Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.

You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.

In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.

I think there is some special pleading going on...

To come up with my grades, I had to do the following.

1) Collate them from the subject heads.

2) Check them against mocks.

3) Check the mocks against the exams from last year

4) if that was all in order, check against baseline grades to see if they were widely out and whether there might be reasons for that

5) Feed back to the relevant SLT member

6) Discuss the materials with her, including going over papers.

7) Meet with her and the principal to agree final grades.

And yes, changes did get made, some up, some down.

Obviously this will have varied from school to school.

But I am happy that my grades were realistic. Yes, they were better than last year, when I had a weak cohort, because I had a strong one. And that was confirmed by baseline data.

I now find that some fat lazy twit in London doesn’t agree and so my students, whom I have worked with for years, will be graded on the basis of a computer model using data that isn’t valid. So that process lasting six weeks when I was also trying to teach online lessons was so much wasted effort.

Anyone who thinks I have no reason to be angry can go fuck themselves. These people making these decisions care only about their worthless careers, and are ruining children’s lives to protect them.

And that is still not to deny it was a stupid process to start, as I have said so many times. At the very least, I should have been asked to submit part of my evidence base. But the mere fact these mindless twats screwed up ab initio and are now screwing up further doesn’t let them off the fact that they have demonstrated total unfitness for office and need to be sacked.

kle4 said:

Scott_xP said:

https://twitter.com/damocrat/status/1292037376655659014

Nations don't cooperate unless they are joined in a political union? That'll be news to a lot of people.

If the specific request is laughable that's one thing, but the implication seems to be that cooperation among sovereign entities is either weak or cause for hilarity. Nonsense designed to make people feel superior in other words.

noneoftheabove said:

kinabalu said:

Just read the Header and I strongly agree.

Labour need to start building the narrative that Boris "Boris" Johnson is a vacuous lump of poshboy privilege who is utterly clueless at anything other than self-promotion and that his breezy insouciant incompetence in this time of great national crisis is taking a terrible toll in lives and livelihoods.

Cometh the hour cometh the clown.

Its not like no-one has discussed is the PM a clown and Labour need to highlight it. A third of the country thinks he is a clown, a third of the country will stick with him whatever, the middle third can and will make their own minds up by 2024 without prompting from Starmer or the Labour party.

Starmers job is to try and ensure there are very few voters going to the ballot box thinking "he is a clown but I have no choice to vote for him because of Labour" rather than trying to convince voters Johnson is a clown. Those decisions will be made on the govts record.

Noisy criticism of the govt during a pandemic is counter productive. Broadly staying supportive, whilst planting some seeds of criticism during the pandemic, that can be exploited later, when everyone has the benefit of hindsight and are less worried, is the right strategy.

noneoftheabove said:

kinabalu said:

Just read the Header and I strongly agree.

Labour need to start building the narrative that Boris "Boris" Johnson is a vacuous lump of poshboy privilege who is utterly clueless at anything other than self-promotion and that his breezy insouciant incompetence in this time of great national crisis is taking a terrible toll in lives and livelihoods.

Cometh the hour cometh the clown.

Its not like no-one has discussed is the PM a clown and Labour need to highlight it. A third of the country thinks he is a clown, a third of the country will stick with him whatever, the middle third can and will make their own minds up by 2024 without prompting from Starmer or the Labour party.

Starmers job is to try and ensure there are very few voters going to the ballot box thinking "he is a clown but I have no choice to vote for him because of Labour" rather than trying to convince voters Johnson is a clown. Those decisions will be made on the govts record.

Noisy criticism of the govt during a pandemic is counter productive. Broadly staying supportive, whilst planting some seeds of criticism during the pandemic, that can be exploited later, when everyone has the benefit of hindsight and are less worried, is the right strategy.

rottenborough said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.

Spare me any violins.

CorrectHorseBattery said:

rottenborough said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.

Spare me any violins.

David should have won

kinabalu said:

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

another_richard said:

kinabalu said:

OldKingCole said:

kinabalu said:

MJW said:

kle4 said:

My browser for some reason recommened an article from a website I'd never heard of before, which had a rather peculiar premise about 'How Corbyn unmasked comedy'.

It seems to be saying tha anti-establishmentism is the key to comedy, and because some famous comedians and comedy programmes disliked Corbyn or did such things as 'blamed Corbyn for Johnson’s victory without taking responsibility for helping Johnson establish his harmless clown persona', that means they were on the same side as 'the establisment'. It calls out Charlie Brooker for a bit on the Corbyn-Branson row which apparently included far more time attacking Corbyn than Branson and didn't consider corporate interests (that Corbyn was indeed wrong about what he claimed I guess is not of relevance).

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/how-corbyn-unmasked-comedy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

Blaming Corbyn for losing an election? Perish the thought. Apparently comedians are are supposed to be political radicals at all times. It's silly of political conservatives to moan that there's too much left wing comedy out there, without Corbynites also now suggesting the comedy establishment is not doing its job because they mocked the great man. (Ed M didn't get it easy either of course).

Onthe other hand, the article itself was therefore of great comedic value.

As we are seeing with the laughable conspiracies around the 'Labour Report' one of the key problems with Corbynism is that it has no safety valve of self-doubt or ability to admit its own failings, as it is predicated on the man and his supporters being uniquely virtuous. Otherwise, what is the point? If you admit nuance and the validity of different views as reasonably held and having their merits within Labour's tradition, why put forward someone the public hate, who even he would admit isn't exactly a natural in the role of leader? Why put up with the ossuary he hangs his clothes in or evidence of managerial incompetence? It only makes sense if he and you have hit upon something uniquely virtuous and everyone else is a nefarious Blairite/Tory acting out of venality and malice.

So comedians must be to blame, not Corbyn. Or Jews. Or Labour officials. Or Laura Kuenssberg, Countdown hosts, anyone who doesn't see the unique virtues of the man or his words must be a bad actor. It's a cultish creed Labour need to stamp out and quarantine itself from as it's just so dangerous - not initially as they have power over very little and are reduced to attacking minor celebrities - but as it rots the brain and would cause huge problems were it to be over something serious where errors had been made it was impossible to reasonably course correct without blaming some conspiracy.

Thank you for this entertaining mix of projection and amateur psychiatry. Now here is what actually happened and why -

In 2015 in a climate favourable to re-election the party suppressed its radicalism - in both content and messaging - for fear of being rogered by the tory press and (linked) of spooking the denizens of Middle England.

Result - a Conservative majority government. Reaction - Fuck it then. Let's stop poncing around. Let's drop the timidity. It's sterile and it's getting us nowhere in any case. We'll shift left. Elect a properly socialist leader and run on a radical platform. No apologies for it. Give the voters the choice and see what happens.

What did happen? - Another loss but close and a better performance than achieved under the previous 2 leaders. And this despite Jeremy Corbyn being a sub-optimal PM candidate on a personal level (deficiency of brain power).

Moral - The left nearly won a GE with a poor leader. With better packaging we can do so one day soon.

Labour didn't lose the 2015 election, particularly in England. They actually had a net gain IN ENGLAND of 4 seats. It was the collapse of the LD's, significantly, but by no means exclusively to the Tories, that put Cameron back in No 10, albeit with a small overall majority than the Coalition had had. It was the rise in the SNP vote that did for Labour.
Milliband should have stayed as leader.

I liked - and like - him but I think he had to go. That 2015 result was such a terrible blow.

EdM's problem was that he never seemed interested beyond the 'ordinary people' of Dartmouth Park. Or as I think Sandy described it 'talking to the top 10% about the bottom 10%'.

Now if only there had been some intelligent lefty who had come from the North but now lived in Hampstead who could have taken EdM to the restaurant in BHS Doncaster then things might have been different.

lol - as if.

But seriously, he was demonized as "geeky" and "red ed" and "wimpy" and all of that, total nonsense, but it seeped in - as your comment testifies. A shame. Would have been a good PM probably. But all substance no style is the very opposite of what we seem to value these days - e.g. the ghastly "Boris".

But I think EdM lacked substance as well.

Or perhaps more generally lacked interest in or empathy towards or relevance to the average person in the average constituency.

Nor was he a skilled enough politician (or dishonest enough person) to be able to fake it.

He was, I suspect, someone who had suffered by being given too much and too much too soon without having to learn and experience things himself.

It's possible you arrived at this perception uninfluenced by the barrage of media messaging along exactly these lines but I am skeptical. EM was by any measure less silver-spooned than the man he ran against and the man in number 10 now. Both of them are the epitome of what you describe in the last para.

But Cameron and Boris were more talented/dishonest as politicians

As was Blair before him.

So he lacked the style and he lacked the substance which Thatcher or Brown revelled in.

Nor did he have the 'everyman' appeal which Major had.

Is insipid the best description of EdM ?

Many in Labour must have thought and so the turn to Corbyn.

He had an image problem. No question about that. You think his image was a fair reflection of reality, I don't. Doesn't matter. In politics there is no practical difference between the two. For example, I think Boris Johnson is a frivolous charlatan out for himself only. But there are millions of suckers out there who think he's a breath of fresh air, a very human politician who is relatable, dynamic, gets things done and tells it like it is. As long as I'm outnumbered by the suckers their perception trumps mine.

spudgfsh said:

noneoftheabove said:

kinabalu said:

Just read the Header and I strongly agree.

Labour need to start building the narrative that Boris "Boris" Johnson is a vacuous lump of poshboy privilege who is utterly clueless at anything other than self-promotion and that his breezy insouciant incompetence in this time of great national crisis is taking a terrible toll in lives and livelihoods.

Cometh the hour cometh the clown.

Its not like no-one has discussed is the PM a clown and Labour need to highlight it. A third of the country thinks he is a clown, a third of the country will stick with him whatever, the middle third can and will make their own minds up by 2024 without prompting from Starmer or the Labour party.

Starmers job is to try and ensure there are very few voters going to the ballot box thinking "he is a clown but I have no choice to vote for him because of Labour" rather than trying to convince voters Johnson is a clown. Those decisions will be made on the govts record.

Noisy criticism of the govt during a pandemic is counter productive. Broadly staying supportive, whilst planting some seeds of criticism during the pandemic, that can be exploited later, when everyone has the benefit of hindsight and are less worried, is the right strategy.

There are four kinds of voters. ones who never vote, ones who will never vote for you, ones who will always vote for you and everyone else.

The thing that Tony Blair knew is that you go for the 'everyone else'. Going for the non-voters is a risk because they rarely show up in enough numbers to make a difference. going for the will always vote for you is too easy (it's popular with the party) but rarely attracts anyone else. and going for the will never vote for you is just wasted effort.

Starmer has time, and low expectations from the public, but he needs to actually show a vision which people in the middle can get behind. even if it upsets some of the base. at the moment I'm not sure what his labour party stands for.

Foxy said:

rottenborough said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.

Spare me any violins.

I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!

Foxy said:

I would like to se Rayner being pushed forward by the party a bit more. She could make a very effective foil to Starmer. That flame haired firebrand could never be depicted as boring or stuffy.

MikeSmithson said:

justin124 said:

A good article as always, though I believe David understates the extent to which the Covid crisis continues to override everything else. At this time the electorate is not likely to be receptive to other messages - other than when serious mistakes have clearly been made. Starmer has put the Government on the defensive in relation to Care Homes and brought about U-Turns on policies such as entry of Care Workers into UK. The polls mean little at this stage and many are like to respond to surveys as if being asked 'How did you vote at the last GE?'. I recall too that in the Parliament elected in June 1987 the Tories remained ahead until Spring 1989.

The collapse of Johnson's approval and best PM ratings are vindication enough for Stamer's strategy. The PM is now a discredited figure.

Sean_F said:

MikeSmithson said:

justin124 said:

A good article as always, though I believe David understates the extent to which the Covid crisis continues to override everything else. At this time the electorate is not likely to be receptive to other messages - other than when serious mistakes have clearly been made. Starmer has put the Government on the defensive in relation to Care Homes and brought about U-Turns on policies such as entry of Care Workers into UK. The polls mean little at this stage and many are like to respond to surveys as if being asked 'How did you vote at the last GE?'. I recall too that in the Parliament elected in June 1987 the Tories remained ahead until Spring 1989.

The collapse of Johnson's approval and best PM ratings are vindication enough for Stamer's strategy. The PM is now a discredited figure.

His ratings are good enough for a PM, nine months into a new Parliament.

Theuniondivvie said:

Fck me, they're still wibbling on about this. Next: why Ireland needs to rejoin the UK.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1291962374421917698?s=20

Foxy said:

rottenborough said:

CorrectHorseBattery said:

Ed M became the leader too early.

If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.

He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.

Spare me any violins.

I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!

ClippP said:

ydoethur said:

ClippP said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

CarlottaVance said:

ydoethur said:

The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.

A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.

If Kate Green can get a handle on that...

What happens Thursday?

A-level grades come out.

Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.

But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:

1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone

2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm

3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.

Which means the following:

1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.

2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.

3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.

4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts

5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.

6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.

7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.

8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.

And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.

This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.

Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.

More here:

https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored

TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.

Thank you.

If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?

At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.

How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’

It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.

Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?

Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.

You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.

In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.

I think there is some special pleading going on...

To come up with my grades, I had to do the following.

1) Collate them from the subject heads.

2) Check them against mocks.

3) Check the mocks against the exams from last year

4) if that was all in order, check against baseline grades to see if they were widely out and whether there might be reasons for that

5) Feed back to the relevant SLT member

6) Discuss the materials with her, including going over papers.

7) Meet with her and the principal to agree final grades.

And yes, changes did get made, some up, some down.

Obviously this will have varied from school to school.

But I am happy that my grades were realistic. Yes, they were better than last year, when I had a weak cohort, because I had a strong one. And that was confirmed by baseline data.

I now find that some fat lazy twit in London doesn’t agree and so my students, whom I have worked with for years, will be graded on the basis of a computer model using data that isn’t valid. So that process lasting six weeks when I was also trying to teach online lessons was so much wasted effort.

Anyone who thinks I have no reason to be angry can go fuck themselves. These people making these decisions care only about their worthless careers, and are ruining children’s lives to protect them.

And that is still not to deny it was a stupid process to start, as I have said so many times. At the very least, I should have been asked to submit part of my evidence base. But the mere fact these mindless twats screwed up ab initio and are now screwing up further doesn’t let them off the fact that they have demonstrated total unfitness for office and need to be sacked.

You certainly have my sympathy if you had to go through all that!

But a question, if I may. Did you ever take part in the CSE exams? These were abolished by the Government of the day, in order to make way for the GCSE.

Sean_F said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Fck me, they're still wibbling on about this. Next: why Ireland needs to rejoin the UK.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1291962374421917698?s=20

A Canzak Union should have been our objective. But, we're several generations too late.

One of the oddities of British Imperial policy was that we could only envisage countries being colonies, or being independent. We could not envisage overseas territories being part of the mother country.

Sean_F said:

Theuniondivvie said:

Fck me, they're still wibbling on about this. Next: why Ireland needs to rejoin the UK.

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1291962374421917698?s=20

A Canzak Union should have been our objective. But, we're several generations too late.

One of the oddities of British Imperial policy was that we could only envisage countries being colonies, or being independent. We could not envisage overseas territories being part of the mother country.

Pulpstar said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

England more doomed that Crassus at Carrhae.

Start chopping the pineapple

TheScreamingEagles said:

Pulpstar said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

England more doomed that Crassus at Carrhae.

Start chopping the pineapple

If I have a normal pizza then pineapple and ice cream as dessert then counts as a pineapple pizza right?

rottenborough said:

Joe Biden would be wise to pick Kamala Harris

https://www.ft.com/content/4d1a3453-f80c-4f29-8ec6-68b533bffc74?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9