Preparing for 2020 results day: Q&A with Comberton Village College

The term “village college” is specific to Cambridgeshire. Originally the brainchild of Henry Morris, a former Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire^, who envisioned school’s that would serve the whole community, reduce rural to urban migration and provide good education. Comberton converted to an academy in February 2011 and is the founder academy for what is now known as the Cam Academy Trust (CAT) which now comprises 11 academies.

“Excellence for All” is the driving force behind everything that Comberton Village College does so we are keen to provide an excellent results day experience for our 260 students in Year 13 and 280 students in Year 11 who will be collecting their results this year."

So in a normal year, pre-coronavirus how did results day normally work at Comberton?

"Most – I’d say 90% - of our students come to the college in person on results days. They like to come and collect their results from us personally - students queue up alphabetically and collect a physical envelope from a staff member.

Our student community come in and share their day with their friends, tutors, academic staff. Students typically arrive early - by 8.30am and after a busy morning of excitement, high emotion, and discussion, the college is usually quiet again by lunchtime.

Whilst most of our students can celebrate and share hugs and tears of joy, obviously there are some students who are disappointed. We always have pastoral team members on hand to help our students make sense of their results, and especially if it seems they could materially affect their future plans.

For Year 13 we have staff available for UCAS support and one to one sessions in computer rooms to help them access clearing and so on. For Year 11 we are there to support students in case they want or need to change their plans for college or their next steps on an academic pathway.

We have an in-house counselling team on hand to support our most vulnerable students, as well as their designated teaching assistant who may escort some of our students and help them understand their results personally, one to one.

For many it’s their last experience of Comberton, the last time they will see some of their teachers and the last time they see some of their friends as they go off to the next chapter of their lives. It’s important to celebrate the culmination of so much hard work and emotional energy."

Obviously, things may need to be quite different this year and there's a lot of uncertainty about what will be safe by August. How are you hoping to provide a similar experience to your students at this year’s results days?

"We canvassed our school leavers and their parents during lockdown. They overwhelmingly told us that they would like to replicate as far as possible the face-to-face element of the traditional results day, given coronavirus related constraints.

We believe in celebrating success and we want to keep the spirit and feeling of a celebrationary summer party.

This is particularly important to our students this year as they have already had their Leavers ceremony hosted virtually, their prom has been postponed and they have been unable to say goodbyes in person. Its vitally important to us to try to provide an experience as close as possible to the ‘normal’ results day.

While we still would want to have on-site results day collection. Practicalities are such that, we are starting to move away from this in our planning to a model that is more electronic for the majority of our learners, with our most vulnerable being offered some on-site support. This is likely to involve sending out electronic results and having a combination of face to face and remote support (via MS Teams)."

There have been reports in the national media that some staff are feeling anxious about this years results day. How are you preparing your staff differently for both results days?

"This years results day is different because of centre assessed grades. CAG’s is our professional judgement of the grade our students would most likely have achieved if they had sat exams this summer and completed any non-exam assessment.

We know that some have speculated that teachers might feel “to blame” for the students results – and some students may feel the same.

However, I don’t believe that this is how Comberton staff feel. We have a trust wide protocol that enables us to say, with confidence, that the results we submitted to the exam board were a team decision, and no single subject teacher should feel the burden of responsibility for an individual students grade.

Our trust used 3 phases of quality assurance. First asking subject teachers for their CAG and ranking (phase 1), then a departmental team to make a whole departmental raking (phase 2), and finally the senior leadership used school historical data, and Fisher Family Trust data to triangulate this decision.

In the sixth form we also had ALPS data to support grade calculations. In fact, we had a full range of data to support and reassure our staff, and a robust process that had a uniformity across the trust, so we could support our staff in making the holistic decisions on grades and ranking. Lockdown fell after we had completed mock exams for both Year 13 and Year 11, so we were able to use that data as part of the decision.

To try to prevent feelings of blame arising in the student/parent body and try to reduce their anxiety we explained the principles of our three phase grading process to students and parents as early as possible. We did not discuss any individuals grades with students or parents, but helped them understand the processes and checks that we were carrying out to try to alleviate their concerns."

So what about students? How have you tried to address student well-being in your plans?

"Well-being has always been important at Comberton, but this year it’s clearly different and requires a different approach.

There isn’t really a one size fits all response from the student body. Some students are feeling relieved and grateful that they have not had to face the pressure of exams, while others are feeling out of control, and anxious that they can’t influence their CAG grades through hard work, grit and revision in the final weeks.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty about what results day will look like. We don’t yet know what behaviours and environments will be safe in August, we don’t know how different students will react and there is also uncertainty about how the exam boards will moderate and standardise our calculated grades.

To be fully prepared with so much uncertainty we have had to plan for significant interventions but hope not to use all of them.

For example, we will have the college counsellor and the college support team on site. We are drafting and updated guidance document for our staff, students and parents that will help them identify where to look for help and guidance on next steps in a wide variety of circumstances from missing the grades they needed to doing significantly better than anticipated. It will also direct them to websites and other services for support.

Support is not only available on the day – we will also support students before and after the day – particularly our vulnerable students. Some of this may need to be remote but where possible we will try to offer face to face support too."

So what kind sort of support and guidance would you like from OCR in the run up to results day?

"We’ve put in place a really robust process to calculate and quality assure our grades but these will be standardised by exam boards.

What we’d really like to do is explain the standardisation process to staff, students and parents before results day. That will require a clear, transparent and timely document detailing the standardisation process to be released by each exam board.

Understanding the standardisation process will help us to help students and parents make good decisions about appeals and resits.

We feel that it will be better for student well being in most cases to understand the full chain of CAG calculation and standardisation and (unless there is a clear error) accept the result and move on to succeed in their next steps whatever they may be. While some may be tempted to appeal / request a number of resits we are concerned that Autumn exams may be extremely difficult emotionally for students who have been out of the classroom since March, as preparation to sit an exam takes moths of build up and support with teaching staff."

This has been a really interesting discussion – is there anything final you’d like to add.

"The process we put in place to do the centre assessed grades is very robust but it was also very time consuming and has had an impact on the time available for teaching and learning of other year groups while we were simultaneously trying to adapt to remote schooling and still deliver high quality content.

We would very much like to move on from assessment and invest more time in Year 10 and Year 12 who will be facing exams in 2021 after highly disrupted schooling this year. We are also worried about their emotional well-being and need to balance our responsibilities to all our students. Our ethos remains “Excellence for All”."

How we will support during the build up to results day

We've now heard from Ofqual, and have summarised the key points about the appeals process for summer 2020 results, outcomes of the autumn 2020 consultation and the new consultation for summer 2021 arrangement.

Over the next few weeks we'll be sharing more information and guidance to support your in the run up to results days in August.