Maximising Achievement with Y11 in the final 15 weeks before the 2025 examinations in England

A companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Wednesday 22nd January 2025.

Note: At date of writing, the provisional KS4 Performance Tables have not been published with some aspects of performance yet to be officially clarified. This briefing paper will be updated once the data has been published.

At Alps, we are with you all the way as you face the challenge of maximising Y11’s outcomes and achievement in 2025.

Context reminder:

• National results for 16-year-olds were slightly higher in 2024 than in 2023 at most grade thresholds.
• National results for 16-year-old students were slightly higher than in 2019 at 9-4 and above. They were below 2019 at the lower grade thresholds – see Table 1

• It seems certain that results will be set at a similar standard again in 2025.
• Once again, the 2024 GCSE results revealed significant gaps in regional performance.
• We are awaiting the published figures, but even if the gender and disadvantage gaps narrowed in 2024 there will almost certainly still be significant gaps.
• As neither Y11 nor Y10 sat KS2 SATs in 2020 or 2021 there will be no Progress 8 in 2025 or 2026.

Possible student baselines to measure progress from

https://alps.education/opinion/no-progress-8-in-2025-or-2026-so-how-can-schools-measure-the-progress-their-students-are-making/

 Some possible priorities

1. Maximising your share of high grades to:

1. 1. Improve your Attainment 8 score and the Basics at 4+ and 5+
   2. Further improve student post-16 pathways and destinations
   3. Recruitment to your L3 courses if your school has a sixth for

2.  Narrowing any cohort gaps, for example:

1. 1. Males v Females
   2. Disadvantaged (PP) v non-disadvantaged
   3. SEND v non-SEND

3. Focusing on attendance to reduce the negative impact of persistent absence.

We are here to support you with our Ten Top Tips

1. If your main target involves the Basics at 4+ or 5+ in 2025, ensure that both Faculty leaders and their teachers know which are their ‘key marginal’ students at the 4/3 and 5/4 grade boundaries.
2. Use the English / maths threshold tool in Connect (in Student Analysis – Attainment Measures) in your regular ‘matching meetings’.
   
   4. Using 5+ as the example, first see which students are ‘on’ 5+ in one faculty but not in the other and then see if they are ‘realistic targets’ as currently on grade 4.
   5. If you use fine grades, perhaps first focus on your 4a or 4+ students.
   6. Identify which teaching sets the Key Marginal 4+ and 5+ students are in.
   7. Discuss the students and strategies with the relevant set teachers.
   8. Use our Connect What-if tool to demonstrate the impact on value-added if those students do achieve the higher grade.

The webinar will guide you through how to use these tools in Connect.

3. Make sure sustaining / improving performance at 9-7, 9-5 and 9-4 are priorities in your school across all subjects and (as appropriate) sets.
4. If your main target involves the Basics in 2025 and 2026, how do you involve all HoDs and their set teachers in the pursuit of further raising student achievement with their cohorts? We recommend setting appropriate 4+, 5+ and 7+ targets for each subject that are subsequently fairly devolved to each set.
5. If your main target involves an Attainment 8 score in 2025 use the Attainment 8 tool in Connect (in Student Analysis – Attainment Measures) to be on top of how key student groups are performing and to identify students for intervention with impact.
6. As these cohorts have no ‘official’ baseline, and will have no P8, a radical solution to setting personal challenge targets that is proving popular is to:
   1. Issue appropriate 4+, 5+ and 7+ targets to HoDs
   2. Allow each department or faculty to decide which students should be targeted 4+, 5+, 7+ based on perceived ability in their subject (providing the set target percentages are maintained).
   3. Set personal challenge targets in each subject using that information
7. Use Connect to ensure you are on top of the subjects, sets and student groups that need to improve to gain outstanding value-added progress / outstanding achievement.

The webinar will guide you through how to add custom columns and how then to be on top of analysing your data in Connect by attendance and how to identify gender, disadvantage and SEND gaps.

8. As usual pay closest attention to maths & English, followed by sciences and your other largest cohort subjects, as these will have the biggest impact on this cohort’s outcomes and post-16 destinations as well as your Performance Tables measures and your Alps’ Quality Indicator. Focus on raising outcomes by concentrating on improving the performance of specific targeted students in specific subjects.
9. Ask HODs to run department meetings based on:
   1. Past papers and mark schemes (especially 2024)
   2. Command words
   3. 2024 Examiner reports & QLA – identifying those ‘silver bullets’ that will improve grades.

Share this invaluable information with your students.

10. Ensure Mock exams are marked to identify individual and collective learning gaps (skills / knowledge) so that these can be addressed, re-assessed and closed before the summer. Based on what commonly lost students marks & grades in your Mocks and what the Examiner Report / QLA reveals lost students marks & grades in 2024, ask HODs to identify 5 main priorities to work on from January to May to aim to make sure students do not make these same errors in the summer.

Five Top Tips for getting the most from Connect

1. Discuss with HODs and teachers which students on their course have the greatest potential to improve their grades.
   1. Use the ‘What-if’ tool in Connect to demonstrate the impact on subject VA of those students achieving a higher grade.
   2. Ensure that all teachers understand what needs to be done to enable each of these students to master the skills or knowledge the lack of which currently blocks them from achieving the next higher grade.
2. Use our comparison and filter tools to understand how the student groups in each subject or set are predicted to perform by disadvantage, gender & SEND.
3. Set up custom columns so you can track the progress of additional groups. We strongly advise setting up attendance groups so that the impact of persistent absence is clear and visible. Empower your ability to act impactfully to improve attendance.

4. Use our Monitoring Accuracy tools to identify:

• which subjects predicted most accurately in 2024?
• which subjects are predicting outcomes most different to previous monitoring grade-point or are predicting much higher outcomes / higher VA than in 2024?

5. Identify students who are underachieving in a range of subjects for intervention.

About the author: John Philip

John started working with Alps in 2008, while he was working at Little Heath Comprehensive School. At Little Heath, John used
Alps to achieve top 2% performance in value-added terms. He also worked with schools regionally and nationally through the
Raising Achievement Partnership Programme. Since leaving Little Heath in 2010, John additionally works as an associate for
22 secondary schools through PiXL.

This blog is a companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Wednesday 22nd January 2025.

For Alps users – to register go to your Connect Homepage and click on “Book your Webinar space” for a full list of our free Champions Webinars.