A companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Thursday 23rd January 2025.

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:

• GCSE grades fell in 2024 as Qualifications Wales returned grading towards 2019 standards as Table 1 using data from the JCQ demonstrates.
• Results in 2024 were slightly lower than in 2016 except at A*-A and A*.
• Results at all thresholds were lower than the final ‘transitional’ award in 2023.

• It seems certain that results will be set at a similar standard again in 2025.
• The KS4 Skills Challenge results were an outlier in 2024, as they were awarded slightly higher at A*-B+ compared to 2023 and higher than in 2019 at A*-C+. Will they be awarded as generously in 2025?
• In 2024, the average Capped 9 indicator was 351.1 points, slightly lower than 354.4 points in 2019 and 358.1 points in 2023.

How did student groups perform in 2024?

• Females continued to out-perform males at KS4, for example by 6.3% at A+ and almost 8% at C+ as this visual from Qualifications Wales indicates.
  
  

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2. Females scored higher in the Capped 9 indicator. From 2019 to 2024 the Capped 9 indicator gap between males and females narrowed from 32.9 to 21.9 points.
   

• Pupils not eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) again scored higher in the Capped 9 indicator than eFSM pupils. In 2024 the gap narrowed to 80.8 points from 87.1 points in 2023. This is closer to the gap of 77.3 in 2019.
• The gap between White British pupils and Black, Asian and minority ethnic pupils narrowed in the Capped 9 indicator with Black, Asian and minority ethnic pupils still achieving better outcomes than White British pupils. The gap narrowed from 22.7 points in 2023 to 18.8 points in 2024.

Some possible priorities

• Maximising your share of high grades to improve student outcomes and post-16 pathways.
• Maximising your share of high grades (A*-C) to improve your Capped 9 points score
• Maximising the achievement of Seren Academy learners.
• Narrowing any cohort gaps, for example:
  • Males v Females
  • eFSM v non-eFSM
  • White British v minority ethnic pupils
• Focusing on attendance to reduce the negative impact of persistent absence.

We are here to support you with our Ten Top Tips

1. Your goals might be your Alps Quality Indicator, or your Capped 9 points score. If you are targeting a high Capped 9 points score, then using Alps Connect to see which students are currently underachieving is highly recommended.
2. Get everyone on board if you want to achieve your goals. Ensure that every middle leader and every set teacher understands their role in achieving the school’s ‘goals’ and feels responsible for helping achieve them.
3. Using Alps Connect effectively keeps all teachers involved in your quest for success and bases the analysis on student progress. Using Connect ensures you are on top of the subjects, sets and student groups that need to improve to gain outstanding Alps’ Grades and a high Capped 9 points score.
4. In terms of Capped 9, our advice is to keep a tight focus on the Literacy, Numeracy and Science slots as these slots contain most of the subjects taken by all your students:
   1. Literacy – best result of first awarding of: Welsh first language or English language or Welsh literature or English literature.
   2. Numeracy – best result of first awarding of: mathematics – numeracy or mathematics.
   3. Science – best result of first awarding of): biology, chemistry, physics, science (double award) applied science (double award) and applied science (single award).
   4. If students perform well in all the subjects they study in those three slots, they may have 6 or 7 good grades to count towards Capped 9.
   5. Beyond that, your other most populous subjects, for example the Welsh Baccalaureate Skills Challenge Certificate, will have the biggest impact on student outcomes, post-16 pathways and your Capped 9 points score.
5. Use Connect to ensure you are on top of any student groups that are underachieving and to be able to visualise the negative impact on outcomes & progress of persistent absence.
   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 (eFSM & EMA) and ethnicity gaps as well as how to have a sharp focus on your Seren Academy students.
6. 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.

7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Focus on raising outcomes and progress by concentrating on improving the performance of targeted students in specific sets in specific subjects.
10. Based on the identified 5 main priorities in each subject ask HoDs, with the Y11 teachers, to identify 5 key marginal students whose grades are most likely to improve with impactful support between now and the summer.

Five Top Tips for getting the most from Connect

1. Having discussed with HODs and teachers which students in which sets have the greatest potential to improve their grades:
   1. Use the ‘What-if’ tool in Connect to demonstrate the impact on subject value-added 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, ethnicity & PA.
3. Set up custom columns so you are able to track the progress of additional groups such as your students on EMA and your Seren Academy students. Set up attendance groups so that the impact of persistent absence is clear and visible so all act to improve attendance.

4. Use our Monitoring Accuracy tools to identify:
   1. which subjects predicted most accurately in 2024?
   2. 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 for intervention who are either:
6. Underachieving in several subjects.
7. On the C/D border in several subjects.

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 Thursday 23rd 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.