The last few weeks I’ve been thinking over and over again about how to square the grade boundary circle in terms of assessments and past papers we use with Year 11 in preparation for summer.

I passionately believe that irrespective of a raw score the most important informations an assessment yields is what areas of the course that students need additional support with to ensure they can improve their knowledge, understanding and ultimately examination performance.

However, we operate within a system where we are accountable to others and ‘hard metrics’ are often used as part of this. From Summer 2017 to Summer 2018 the grade boundaries for the Edexcel 1MA1 specification increased at pretty much all grade points; this is unsurprising when you consider that teachers are more becoming more familiar with the new specifications and changes made to KS3 as a result of the new specifications are starting to filter through. All good mathematicians know that from two data points a trend cannot be determined, so where do we draw the line in the sand to enable us to deliver a realistic ‘current’ grade for students who need these for colleges etc and also for internal accountability measures and tracking.

To try and gain as wide an understanding of what others are doing in this game of crystal ball gazing I put my first poll on Twitter and have been amazed by the speed of responses and conversations that this has generated!

I can confidently say that I don’t think there is a an answer to this question apart from stripping away the grades in school and focussing entirely on what we are going to do about gaps in knowledge etc.

Until then I’ll be going for a Summer 2018 + buffer to try and reduce the likelihood of having students in August, who think they have been achieving their target grade or that magical 4 so they don’t have to resit that are then disappointed.