You can hold its head under to force it to drink but you’ll either annoy or drown it. Targets are the bane of a teacher’s life. Target grades or levels are predicted using a graph based on what they’ve done in previous exams, as well as other stuff like whether they are entitled to free school meals. In theory a child can take a key stage 1 exam at the age of 7 and from that level you can predict what they are going to get up until GCSE when they are 16.
This system is flawed for various reasons, but once a target has been generated it’s very difficult to change, especially downwards, although it is very easy to move it upwards. Schools are given targets of A* to C grades by the local authority which they have to try and meet, with improvements year on year so that the government can say that standards are rising.
The problem is that the predicted grades are only really accurate for 50% of children, meaning that they aren’t accurate for 50%. This is not so widely known, but appears to have little bearing on local authority battering of school senior management, who in turn batter heads of department, who in turn batter teachers.
When a teacher receives the target grades for their class in the first year of GCSE they can usually tell within a few weeks whether the child is capable of reaching that grade. As standards are being forced up centrally, target grades seem to get more and more unreachable, therefore demoralising students and teachers alike.
There is also the fact that a C grade is regarded as a pass (all grades are regarded as a pass, but C and above are seen as “proper” passes). The child who has no intention of taking mathematics, or any other core subject such as English, beyond GCSE level will therefore be happy with a C grade, whatever their target may be. The amount of times that a teacher hears “I’m don’t need maths for what I’m going to do” is depressing, and most students don’t realise that for almost every job application you need to put down what you got in English and Maths at GCSE or equivalent.
Strangely enough English and Maths always struggle to hit their targets as every student has to take the subject whether they like it or not, whereas the subjects the students choose, or their options, tend to hit their targets because the students actually chose it and it would reasonable to assume, enjoy that subject.
The longer my teaching career has gone on, the less motivating targets have become from both sides of the desk. The students are expected to know what their targets are in each subject (Ofsted will ask apparently), but generally make little effort to achieve it. And who can blame them? If you know your target is very tough and almost insurmountable, most will not bother. There will always be a occasional child who will have a go but not expect to achieve it – if they do, it’s a bonus.
The main problem is that children and their ever changing attitude to their own education are not an exact science, means that predictions are always going to be flawed. It seems that predicted grades are here to stay, but at least make them realistic.
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