Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School

Background

Bacup and Rawtenstall is a larger than average, selective, co-educational grammar school in Lancashire for pupils aged between 11 and 18. The school converted to Academy status in 2012 and is rated Outstanding by Ofsted. Will Seddon, Assistant Headteacher and Head of Maths, discusses how he, and his experienced team of maths teachers, use the Access to Scripts service for detailed analysis to tailor support for students and help improve teaching at the school.

Scripts help us understand the ‘why’ behind students’ mistakes

Once students’ have their GCSE results, we ask for permission to access their scripts. We have about 90% who agree, after which we download every script that we have permission for via the Access to Scripts service. Our main objective is to concentrate on the reasons why students have made mistakes, and what we can do to make sure they don’t make those mistakes in the future, rather than put it down to the fact they simply didn’t score very well.

I organise the downloaded exam papers into sets and I then use Acrobat Pro to strip out and separate every single question into class groups of Q1, Q2 etc. This is a time-consuming process, but it’s completely worth it. This approach allows our teachers to see how their classes have answered in each question for all three papers. We use the excellent ResultsPlus question level breakdown to understand the average score of students compared to the national average score (of each question by grade). This allows us to identify possible areas where classes haven’t done as well and we use the scripts to give us the richness of information which proactively helps inform our teaching.

Insights from scripts identifies areas teachers need to focus on

We find the scripts are great for highlighting areas we need to work on; this is something that overall data analysis of performance doesn’t give us. For example, if a student has made a mistake such as one plus one is three, then it’s clearly a silly mistake where a student has tripped up. We had an incident where one set’s average mark was equivalent to Grade 5 candidates, but every other set got the Grade 9 equivalent which left us perplexed. It turned out that one student had misread the question and answered something totally different. This student dropped the entire class average down to a Grade 5 equivalent on a relatively easy question. Incidents like this can impact how we look at our overall results and sometimes leave staff questioning if there was a problem with their teaching when, in reality, we have looked at the papers and it’s obvious it’s a silly mistake or oversight. We need to allocate our time and efforts where there’s clearly a misunderstanding on the students’ side. This tends to be the harder questions and we can see not only that they have got three out of five, but why they’ve got three out of five.

Every teacher has a certain skill, and obviously every teacher is different. When we’re teaching a topic such as quadratics, everyone will have a different style. If, say, quadratics was not one of our strongest subjects in the GCSE exams, we check to see whether or not we’ve made any improvements in the Year 11 trials now, or if it’s still our weakest area. If it is, then we talk about it in our department meeting, and we’ll try and work on improving it. This way the students don’t make the same mistakes as the previous cohort. We are an experienced group of mathematicians and subject specialists, so it is a case of using this information positively to refine our teaching practices and make sure that we improve our teaching and learning as a whole. These scripts are invaluable to us as a school and we are delighted they are free from Pearson.

Script analysis helps support students progressing to A levels

We also use scripts to help inform our A level maths advice. We have an A level maths entry requirement that stipulates students have to get a Grade 6, and a Grade 7 to study further maths. We have students with a Grade 6 who ask us if we think they should do A level. If they have been at the school in Year 11, then I can advise any student by looking at their scripts and the question breakdown. We can do this because we know which areas and topics will and will not carry on into A level.

An example is drawing plans and elevations of shapes at GCSE: there’s not much call for it at A level. However, solving quadratic equations is something that is important. We can have a look and if a student has scored 100% in drawing three-dimensional shapes, and that has contributed towards them getting that Grade 6, it’s not going to help them at A level. However, if the student got 100% of their quadratics right, and they got a Grade 6, that will really help. We try and look at where they have got their Grade 6 from. We can help students by personalising any advice we give based on their performance.

The outcome – scripts are an invaluable resource to support our teaching

Access to Scripts is an incredibly important part of our teaching. It’s the teaching and learning part we draw from scripts that the data alone doesn’t give you. The data gives a guide as to whether a student did well in a certain area or not; it doesn’t give us the level of insight we get from the scripts. Scripts enable us to analyse why students haven’t done so well and then as a team we can focus on the reasons behind it. It’s the level of depth we get from looking at the scripts that is critical. This richness of information helps support us in identifying gaps, and tweak and refine our teaching so we can make incremental changes to boost progress.