What Happened The Six Dimensions Project Report 2018 Nick Allen June 2018 SFCA works to lead and support a thriving and sustainable Sixth Form College sector by being an effective advocate, adviser and information provider for members and a reliable and authoritative source of insight, data and expertise for policy-makers and opinion-formers. For more information about this report please contact Vanessa Donhowe: Sixth Form Colleges Association 8th Floor 50 Broadway London SW1H 0RG 020 3824 0468 [email protected] sixthformcolleges.org © Sixth Form Colleges Association What Happened The Six Dimensions Project Report 2018 Contents Chapter One: Known Knowns, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns Revisited Chapter Two: Retention on Two Year A level Courses Chapter Three: Performance in Linear A levels in Sixth Form Colleges Chapter Four: The Quality of Equality Chapter Five: The Gender Agenda Chapter Six: Programmes of Study and Patterns of Enrolment Appendix One: Understanding Six Dimensions Reports Introduction In the autumn of 2017, What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s account of the 2016 election campaign was published. It had a rather good and deliberately ambiguous title, interpretable in whole range of ways. From a gentle, enquiring ‘so what happened’, to a forensically analytical ‘what happened?’, through to a raging primal scream of ‘what happened?’. In Hilary’s case, Trump happened, and the interpretation of how that happened will keep psephologists busy for some time. Last year, something significant happened to us. It may not have been Trump sized, but nevertheless, the conclusion of the first round of A level reform represents a fundamental shift in the landscape, and understanding and navigating this shift represents a vital challenge for colleges. This year’s Six Dimensions Report seeks to unpack this first round of reformed A levels, and help understand the national and sixth form college landscape. In last year’s project, we conducted a review of the assessment and accountability context: Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns1 sought to establish what we knew about curriculum reform and what we were yet to find out. The summer of 2017 yielded the answers to many, but not all of the questions that remained. The analysis presented here returns to this context 1 Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknowns: the Six Dimensions Project Report, 2017 1 and seeks to crystallise our understanding of the new A level assessments. This is of course much more that a dry academic analysis of what happened. It is presented with the aim of building understanding in colleges. If we understand things well, then our chances of reacting well to changing circumstances increases significantly, as do the chances of students securing excellent outcomes. Matthew Syed’s excellent Black Box Thinking2 looks at the role of the pursuit of marginal gains in the journey to excellence. It details how highly successful teams (in business and in sport) learn from a forensic analysis of performance and a thirst to learn from the mistakes of others. The title of the book alludes to how the aviation industry has dramatically improved its safety record by sharing the analysis of airline disasters with all competitors. We have much to gain from such an approach. Our analysis in this report works at two levels. Firstly, we seek to glean understanding from the national context, looking at what we can learn from the first cycle of awarding in the reformed A levels and GCSEs. The rest of the report focuses in on the sixth form college sector, examining how A level reform and the on-going implementation of programmes of study played out in our sector. In Chapter One: Known Knowns, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns Revisited we return to the heart of last year’s report and seek to examine how our knowledge of assessment and accountability has developed over the past year. We examine awarding in the reformed A levels, and consider the emerging picture at GCSE, as well as casting a glance towards more vocational provision and grading in universities. In Chapter Two: Retention on Two Year A level Courses we focus on the one thing that is definitely different from what came before and what we currently know little about: retention. The move towards courses recorded over two years presents new challenges in monitoring and assessing student progress, and the foundation of managing these processes is knowing the patterns nationally. In Chapter Three : Performance in Linear A levels in Sixth Form Colleges we focus on the reformed A level qualifications, and examine how successful sixth form colleges were in delivering these qualifications in 2017. In Chapter Four: The Quality of Equality we look at performance in the sector across a range of equality and diversity monitoring groups. In Chapter Five: The Gender Agenda, we focus in on the relationship between gender and progress looking at outcomes in both linear and modular courses. In Chapter Six, programmes of study and patterns of enrolment we look at what is happening across sixth form colleges in terms of changes to student study programmes, and look at the effectiveness of different curriculum pathways over two years In Appendix One, we offer a guide to how to interpret the reports in the six dimensions suite. The aim of this analysis is very simple. We have little influence over the way that reforms are constructed, but it is entirely within our gift to make it a priority to learn from the national context and seek to shape our colleges to the advantage of our students. Used well, this analysis can give us 2 Matthew Syed: Black Box Thinking (John Murray, 2015) 2 significant advantages in terms of understanding our own colleges, developing our own responses to curriculum change and responding intelligently to emerging performance issues. Finally, as ever, I would like to thank the SFCA and individual colleges for supporting this work, and MIS teams for their work in putting together the data returns that underpin the analysis. Nick Allen, 26 June 2018 Key Findings • In the reformed A level subjects, students performed exactly in line with similarly qualified students in 2016. The value added score of -0.01 suggests that one in fifty students achieved a grade below expectation. (Figure 1.0) • In many reformed A level subjects, the pass marks were very low (Figure 1.1). • There is a clear relationship between prior attainment and retention over two years (Figure 2.2) • In reformed A levels, those students recorded as being on two year courses performed significantly less well in A level examinations that their peers on the same subject who had sat an AS level at the half way point, even though these AS levels did not contribute to the A level grade. The gap of 0.25 suggests those on two-year courses performed a quarter of a grade per entry below those on two consecutive one year courses (Figure 3.3) • There are patterns of retention by equality and diversity monitoring group, which are mirrored in AS level and A level outcomes. (Figure 4.1) • Students from challenging individual circumstances (eligible for free college meals) and those from disadvantaged communities (IDACI – bottom income quartile) perform less well than other students (Figures 4.0 and 4.1) • In reformed A levels, male students made significantly more progress than female students. The gap of 0.11 suggests that one in ten male students made a grade further progress than similarly qualified female students (Figure 4.3) • The use of AS level exams in sixth form colleges has collapsed. In 2016-17 there were just 96,901 enrolments on AS level courses, compared to 244,185 just two years before. (Figure 6.0) • Take up of reformed BTEC NQF qualifications is very low, and performance in reformed qualification is significantly different to those on legacy qualifications. In reformed certificate qualifications, just 20% of students secured a Distinction or Distinction* grade. (Figure 6.3) • At average GCSE scores below 6.0, students are far more likely to secure the equivalent of three A level passes if they are on pure BTEC programmes. For students with an average GCSE score of 5.2 to 5.5, 78% of BTEC students secure three passes, compared to only 57% of those on pure A level qualifications (Figure 6.10) 3 • Students with mental health difficulties and emotional and behavioural difficulties are significantly less likely than other students to complete the two years of a level 3 programme. Those with mental health difficulties are 14% less likely to be retained than students with similar GCSE grades (Figure 6.14) 4 Chapter One: Known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns revisited Before we progress to present the outcomes of this year’s analysis of the sixth form college family, it is important to establish what we have learned about the national context over the past year. As we outlined in the six dimensions report a year ago, there was a lot that we did not know, and the first round of outcomes in reformed A levels and GCSEs provides the answers to some of these questions. In steering the programme of reform, Ofqual was quite clear that it was going to use comparable outcomes methodology3 to ensure that students taking exams in the early years of a reformed qualification at both GCSE and A level were not disadvantaged by curriculum reform. Being ‘disadvantaged by curriculum reform’, is code for a group experiencing a significant drop in the pass rate as a result of candidates producing work that is not at the level produced by previous cohorts on established specifications. The logic goes like this: in the early years of a qualification, students are unlikely to produce work of the quality of those taking established qualifications, as it takes teachers time to develop a full understanding of assessment objectives, question style, and specification content, and it takes examiners time to be able to mark with confidence.