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News

The latest from The Consortium Academy Trust.

August 2020

  • Delighted to share GCSE results with our young people today

    Published 20/08/20

    We are delighted that our academies will be able to share GCSE results with young people today. These are a testament to their hard work and perseverance over many years, with the support of the great staff who work tirelessly to ensure they have a positive learning experience and be their best selves.

    As a Trust we wanted to take the opportunity to explain how results were determined this year in our academies. As you know, this year’s GCSE results had to be awarded differently from usual, after exams were unable to go ahead due to Covid-19. Schools and colleges were asked to use their professional experience to make a fair and objective judgement of the grades they believed a student would have achieved had they sat their exams this year, and to submit these Centre-Assessed Grades (CAGs) to the relevant exam board.

    Groups of teachers and leaders in each subject in all of our academies worked together to discuss and agree the Centre-Assessed Grade for each student on an individual basis. They took into account a wide range of available evidence, including class work, mock exams, homework, internal assessments and other records of student performance.

    The intention was that the exam boards would then moderate the CAGs, to check that schools and colleges had approached this task consistently, before providing students with their final calculated grades. Unfortunately, as you will no doubt be aware, the method they used to do this proved problematic, and was likely to lead to many grades being unfairly downgraded and therefore placing the life chances of our young people at risk.

    The government therefore made the decision that GCSE and A level students would be awarded whichever was higher for each subject – their CAG or their centrally calculated grade. The grades that each young person receives today will therefore be whichever is the higher of these two grades.

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  • Continued commitment to, and advice for, our learners

    Published 12/08/20

    The recent months have been a real challenge for all aspects of our lives and no more so than for the many hundreds of learners within our TCAT academies who were due to sit external examinations this summer. Our staff, learners and parents, who work so hard together as a team during the academic year and in the build up to the exams, were left shell shocked by the news that the examination series for Summer 2020 would be cancelled when the announcement was made in March.

    However, since then our learners have shown remarkable resilience with the vast majority recognising that, to make their next education or career move as successful as possible, they needed to continue their commitment to learning. At the same time our school leaders and teachers have been working hard to ensure that no learner is disadvantaged for their future pathway choices and that accurate Centre Awarded Grades, based on a range of evidence and internal scrutiny, have been submitted for all students in all subjects to all exam boards. We are confident that our process was fair and robust at individual learner level and we are looking forward to celebrating the successes of our learners over the coming weeks with A Level and GCSE outcomes being available on Thursday 13 August and Thursday 20 August respectively.

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