Assessment

At Key Stage 3 it is important for pupils to understand how their attainment of skills and knowledge match the requirements of the school’s curriculum (this is a combination of the national curriculum requirements and our own school specific curriculum content).

The grading reflects the pupils’ progression in the development of skills and acquisition of knowledge across the three years of KS3.  This means that grades will typically be across the lower end of the scale in Y7 and will then progress to the end of Y9.  Not all pupils will see an increase in grade for each individual assessment as assessments include content from everything that has been learned by that stage of the curriculum and so revision for individual pupils will vary and other circumstances will affect performance, but the general trend across the key stage will demonstrate progression across the scale.  It is also the case that an increase in the breadth of curriculum content means that maintaining a particular grade is in itself demonstrating progress.

The grades are scaled from ‘Emerging’ to ‘Developing’ to ‘Secure’ to ‘Refining’.  Each grade has three sublevels and so E1 is the start of the scale and R3 is the top of the scale.  The thresholds are weighted so that at the end of Y9, a pupil achieving ‘Emerging’ would – all things being equal and there is a range of factors that could affect this – typically achieve grade 1 or 2 at the end of Y11 in their GCSEs; ‘Developing’ would equate to grades 3 and 4 across the same progression; ‘Secure’ grades 5 and 6; and ‘Refining’ grades 7,8 and 9.