First GCSE results after 11-plus ‘hard to compare’
The first set of GCSE results from high schools since the end of the 11-plus will be a landmark, director of education Nick Hynes has said.
This year’s cohort will be the first to have gone automatically to the States-run secondary schools after the end of selection at 11.
That means there will be no results from the Grammar School and instead results will be from students from Les Varendes High.
The change will have seen students of all ability spread across the four high schools, said Mr Hynes, so differences could be seen across results from all the schools.
‘The comparison against previous years is going to be difficult if you compare school-on-school, and the most appropriate thing to do will be to compare the whole Bailiwick data,’ he said.
‘It is going to be a landmark set of data – our first non-selective data.’
While the end of the 11-plus will also have affected the fee-paying colleges with the end of scholarships, these schools still require students to qualify.
‘The colleges do have a selection process with regards to who enters and those are cognitive assessment tests,’ said Mr Hynes. ‘So their cohorts are at least average and above.’
Secondary School Partnership executive principal Liz Coffey said that there was now a redistribution of higher ability students.
‘So you’ve not got a skewing of all of those children going into a grammar selective system.’
There will be further change next year when the number of States-maintained high schools will fall from four to three, with the merging of La Mare de Carteret with Les Varendes.
‘Small cohorts can be really interesting because individual students count for a greater percentage of the result than they do in a bigger school,’ she said.
Mock exams had been used to check that students were on track, said Mr Hynes, but it was risky to use these in an attempt to forecast how the real exams might go.
‘Predictions can be 30% either way based on based on models. I think what we would say is we’d be anticipating results at least in line with last year.’
LAST YEAR’S RESULTS
Taking an average across all States-maintained schools in the Bailiwick last year, 54.9% of students achieved a grade 4 or higher in English and maths.
The Grammar had the highest percentage, at 98.7, with La Mare de Carteret High the lowest at 36.7.
Les Beaucamps recorded 45.7% and St Sampson’s 43.4%.
St Anne’s in Alderney was 50%, while the results were 30% at Les Voies.
