Predicting a student’s GCSE grade using an algorithm based on prior data has been decried as inaccurate and even inhumane. Yet there is an area where we have been doing this for years: target grades.
Pupils’ key stage 2 data is used to provide them with a predicted grade for their GCSEs. It leads to the absurd situation where I take a new Year 10 business studies class and tell them all to stick a target sheet into their books and write down the target grade they have been allocated based on how well they drew a triangle to scale in Year 6.
GCSEs: Why target grades don’t work
This is not to denigrate the work done in primary school. But that work is simply not indicative of how a student will do five years later in their GCSE exam in an unrelated subject.
The idea of a generic skill being transferable to all subjects is the zombie idea that just won’t die. Surely even its strongest proponents wouldn’t suggest that target grades are accurate? Where is the research to suggest their efficacy?
I find it remarkable that something that can waste so much learning time has been implemented with no evidence.
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So why do we still rely on target grades?
Not motivating
The argument you often hear in support of target grades is that targets motivate students, as they can compare their current grade with their target.
But this assumes that we can determine students’ “current” grade with any accuracy. A student can sit an assessment in January of Year 10 and get 62 per cent. This doesn’t mean that they are “currently at” a certain grade. All it tells me is that of the specific questions on the specific topics assessed, they got 62 per cent right.
It does not tell me what grade they will get in a GCSE that samples content from a whole specification 18 months later. If students cannot say they are “currently at” a grade, then how is the target motivating?
Students need actionable feedback
To make progress, students need specific, actionable feedback about what they need to do to improve. Writing a generic target at the front of their book to “explain your points more” neither motivates nor helps them. The hundreds of pieces of mini-feedback that you offer throughout lessons are what will lead to progress.
I might tell a student to “critique the assumption of no transport costs” in an essay on comparative advantage. This is useful feedback, but not relevant to any other topic and it cannot be conveyed in a generic termly target. Yet it is through responding regularly to such feedback that progress is made.
Irrational use of target grades
Target grades are especially harmful in schools with weak leadership, where their extensive use is irrational. I have seen teachers stay in school late, glueing target sheets into books with generic targets written on them, simply to ensure that they would not “fail” an observation.
Elsewhere, teachers might drill their students to know their target grade and termly target off by heart in case a member of SLT asks them. They know if a student is asked “what do you need to do to reach your target?” and that student cannot give a vague one-sentence answer, then it is curtains for them.
Now is the time to change this. Having seen the damage that arbitrary allocation of grades based on past performance can do, it is finally time to kill the target grade.
Yousuf Hamid is a business and economics teacher at a high school in London
