Final Teacher Assessed Grades and receiving your results

This information is relevant to all students on a BTEC, City & Guilds or GCSE programme.

Level 3 students will receive their results from Tuesday 10^th August, while GCSE and Level 2 students will receive their results from Thursday 12^th August.

READ THE FULL UPDATE BELOW:

Dear Student,

Further Education Update June 2021 - Final Teacher Assessed Grades and receiving your results

On behalf of the College Governors and the whole staff team at Myerscough, we would like to wish you well and hope you have enjoyed your time this year at College, given the ongoing disruption caused by the COVID pandemic.

We wanted to thank you for your resilience, patience and continuing engagement with your Tutors, Progress Coaches and Inclusive Learning staff throughout the year.

You will be aware that this year, there have been some changes to the final assessment systems for your programme elements.

All BTEC qualifications, including English, Maths and Sciences, have been provided with a Qualification Teacher assessed grade, which means that your teaching team have used the evidence of assessments throughout the year and at the end of the year, to make an evidence based judgement of your final grades for the full qualification.  

City & Guilds have been using a slightly different system which requires your teachers to look at your overall performance, using the evidence provided through your assessments and the recent  synoptic assessments, to make an evidenced based judgement on your final Teacher Assessed Grades.

The assessments for many other qualifications have remained unchanged and continuing as normal, where a student has to pass the assessment to achieve the qualification.

Evidence on which Teacher Assessed Grades are based

For both BTEC and City & Guilds qualifications which are teacher assessed, we have used the following information to inform grade decisions:

1. Work produced in response to assessment materials normally provided by the exam board, including past papers, and the groups of questions being provided to support evidence gathering this summer, or similar materials such as practice or sample papers.
2. Non-exam assessment (NEA) work (often referred to as coursework), even if this has not been fully completed.
3. Student work produced in centre-devised tasks that reflect the specification, that follow the same format as exam board materials and have been marked in a way that reflects exam board mark schemes. This can include substantial class or homework (including those that took place during remote learning), internal tests taken by pupils and mock exams taken over the course of study.
4. Records of a student’s capability and performance over the course of study in performance[1]based subjects.
5. Records of each student’s standard of work over the course of study.

Other Relevant Information

Where students with a disability have an agreed reasonable adjustment (for example a Reader or Scribe), or other students have an agreed access arrangement, we will consider this in our judgements and ensure that we take account of likely achievement with the reasonable adjustment/access arrangement in place.

If, during the year, you have suffered a bout of illness or some other circumstance happened that  meant you were unable to take an assessment, that might have affected your performance, we will not allow this to affect grade judgements.

Judgements will reflect how you would have performed under ordinary circumstances in order to ensure that no student is disadvantaged.

Results Notification

The grade release days will be:

Level 3 students will receive their results on Tuesday 10 August 2021

GCSE and Level 2 students will receive their results on Thursday 12 August 2021

Your grades will be uploaded into the College system as soon as they are received from the awarding body.

You will be able to access your results via your Student Portal.

Certificates will be posted to you after we have received them from the awarding bodies on, or about, the end of August and September.

We are unable to allow the collection of certificates in person and we ask that you do not ring the College Exams team to arrange collection.

Please ensure that your contact details on the student portal are correct.

Appeals Process

Everyone in College and the awarding bodies will be working hard to make sure you are issued with the correct grades on Results Day, there will also be an appeals system as a safety net to fix any genuine errors that were not identified earlier on.

If you believe an error has been made in determining your grade, you will have a right to appeal.

There are two stages to the appeals process:

Stage 1: Centre Review

If you don’t think you have been issued with the correct grade, you can appeal to the College, who will review whether they:

• made an administrative error, e.g. submitted an incorrect grade; used an incorrect assessment mark when determining your grade.
• did not apply a procedure correctly, e.g. did not follow their Centre Policy, did not undertake internal quality assurance, did not take account of access arrangements or mitigating circumstances, such as illness.

To help you decide whether to appeal, you can request that we share with you the following information after results day:

• Our Centre Policy;
• the sources of evidence used to determine your grade along with any grades associated with them;
• details of any special circumstances that have been taken into account in determining your grade, e.g. access arrangements, mitigating circumstances such as illness.

Stage 2: Appeal to the Awarding Body

If you still don’t think you have the correct grade after the centre review is complete, you can ask us to appeal to the awarding body, who will review whether:

• we made an unreasonable exercise of academic judgement in the choice of evidence from which we determined your grade and/or in the determination of your grade from that evidence.

Reasonable judgement is one that is supported by evidence.

An exercise of judgement will not be unreasonable simply because a student considers that an alternative grade should have been awarded, even if the student puts forward supporting evidence.

There may be a difference of opinion without there being an unreasonable exercise of judgement. The reviewer will not remark individual assessments to make fine judgements but will take a holistic approach based on the overall evidence.

The College did not apply a procedure correctly, e.g. they did not follow their Centre Policy, did not undertake internal quality assurance, did not take account of access arrangements or mitigating circumstances, such as illness.

The awarding body made an administrative error, e.g. they changed your grade during the processing of grades.

At both stages of the process you will need to submit your appeal to College and give written consent to conduct the appeal or submit it to the exam board on your behalf.

It’s important to remember that your grade can go down, up or stay the same through either stage of the process.

If you have a place at University that is dependent on your appeal, you should tell the University you are hoping to go to so they can decide how to handle your offer.

You should also tell the College so they can ask the awarding body to prioritise your appeal.

The timelines for priority and non-priority appeals will be as follows:

Priority appeals deadlines (for those with a potential HE University application at stake)

10/12 August to 23 August: priority appeals window

10/12 August to 16 August: student requests centre review

10/12 August to 20 August: centre conducts centre review

11/12 August to 23 August: centre submits appeal to awarding body

Non-priority appeals, (those without a HE University application deadline)

10/12 August to 17 September: majority of non-priority appeals take place

10/12 August to 3 September: student requests centre review

10/12 August to 10 September: centre conducts centre review

11/12 August to 17 September: centre submits appeal to exam board

Finally, if you believe the awarding body has made a procedural error in handling your appeal, you can apply to Ofqual’s Exam Procedures Review Service to review the process undertaken by the awarding body.

Progression

We would be happy to consider your application for next year and will update you quickly on progress once in receipt.

We also offer support for you if you choose to move from Further Education into Higher Education, offering a range of university courses that we are sure will be of interest.

If you want to discuss next steps, please contact your Programme Leader or our Careers Co-ordinator via email at careers@myerscough.ac.uk

As referred to earlier, as soon as we have more information from the awarding bodies we will update you immediately.

Please keep safe and well and if you need any support from the team at Myerscough please contact your Programme Leader or Progress Coach.

May we take this opportunity to wish you success in your achievements and hope you keep safe and well.

Yours sincerely

Paul Thompson

Assistant Principal – Further Education