Why we have stopped using target grades

A couple of years ago I received a letter of complaint from the father of one of the students at my school. His concern was that the target grades we had issued were demotivating his son. The father had a point: his son had just achieved grades in his end of Year 10 exams which were higher than the targets, and so were the teachers’ latest forecasts. The father and son were relatively easily satisfied with an upward adjustment of the target grades, but I found it a hard complaint to respond to because I had long harboured my own qualms about target grades, expressing them in a Twitter thread back in 2019. The complaint, therefore, did not change my opinion, but it did spur me to act on my convictions.

At the time of the complaint we were up to our necks in lateral flow testing, contact tracing, exam cancellations and the like, so it was not a suitable time to make unforced changes, but I did start to take more conscious steps to explain my views to the Head at my school and to my colleagues on the SLT, whom I needed on board with any move. They were willing to listen and we took the plunge last term, not issuing any target grades to the current Year 10 and 12 cohorts at the start of their courses, unlike in previous years. We have also stopped using them with staff, in the sense that the grades are not available for teachers to look up behind the scenes any more than they are reported to students; we have gone cold turkey and simply rejected the whole concept. As a highly successful school with a strong track record of results it can be hard to justify changing anything about the formula, but I am proud that we did not rest on our laurels and were open to a new approach.

I should be clear that this post is not intended to provide a comprehensive outline of the case against target grades. Others, such as Ben Newmark, have already made those arguments far better than I could, so I will not repeat what they have said here. Instead I want to explain why we acted on those arguments and why we did so this academic year. I hope my explanation will provide a short case study in leadership decision-making as well as food for thought about target grades, and in order to do this I need to tell three very quick stories.

The first story is about curriculum and the development of staff expertise. For several years as a school we have been working on the ambition of our curriculum, how well it maps the learning journey we want students to take, and the effectiveness of our pedagogy in delivering it. In the last year or two of this open-ended project we have turned our attention to assessment, seeking to improve our formal and informal approaches to assessing students, so that they enable us to draw more valid and useful inferences (I gave some indication of the sort of stuff we have been thinking about in this Twitter thread a while ago). The work we have done (and continue to do) means that I am now confident that our teachers can cope without relying on target grades as a rough indicator when they make assessment judgements (this isn’t something they should do but I must admit that I have been guilty of it in the past). As we have developed our thinking and practice in this field, target grades have become increasingly incongruous. It makes absolutely no sense for me to expect my colleagues to act on what I say about the curriculum representing our aim for all students, whatever their background or prior attainment, while I simultaneously serve up a tool designed expressly for the purpose of predicting what students are likely to be capable of after we have taught them. Neither does it make sense for me to ask teachers to treat the curriculum as the progression model, directing their attention to how securely students are learning it rather than how well they are performing against a set of criteria, while I also provide benchmarks separate from the curriculum for monitoring purposes. Target grades were holding us back and it was time for them to go.

The second story is about the expectations we communicate to students and the sort of culture we are trying to build. We want them to see each assessment task as a learning opportunity, not a hurdle to be cleared in the manner of a show-jumper seeking a flawless round. We want them to be willing to take the risk of trying new new things in a quest to improve their work, not to play it safe all the time. We want them to pay attention to our formative feedback, not to be preoccupied with whether or not they have hit a particular threshold. To this end we introduced a ‘no grades’ policy across the school a couple of years ago, no longer giving grades for individual assignments other than significant internal exams. However, just as was the case in my previous story, the continued presence of target grades was blocking the road: how could we expect students to embrace this healthy culture of error and learning if we were also providing them with a target grade and telling them they should be aiming to achieve it, with the implicit message that they should be able to do so from the outset?

The third and final story is about my own teaching. For the past few years I have tried to put my views into practice by doing my utmost to avoid finding out my students’ target grades. I have even gone to slightly eccentric extremes to achieve this, such as covering up the target grades column of report templates whilst attempting to complete other sections. It has become a bit of a joke with my classes; each year I ask them not to tell me their target grades and point out that they only reveal how well they did in a previous key stage, which does not help me to teach them any better in the here and now. If anything it has the opposite effect, by anchoring my expectations of each student in a way which, once known, I cannot unknow. My students tend to roll their eyes and smile indulgently every time I wax lyrical about the fact that I have no way of knowing their potential and that it is my job to teach them as well as I possibly can and believe they are all capable of doing brilliant things, but I think they secretly like it. There has certainly been no decline in their results; if anything the opposite has happened. I quite enjoyed my personal act of rebellion and found the experience liberating, but I concede it was somewhat hypocritical of me, so it was time to be braver and put my convictions to the test across the whole school. This final story helps to explain why I was so keen to abolish target grades with staff as well as with students.

I hope that my stories have at least given you pause for thought about target grades, but I would like to finish by highlighting something which, in my view, gets to the heart of what tipped the balance for us. It concerns the tendency for arguments against target grades to be quite theoretical and to offer little concrete vision of how things would be better without them. The case is made on the back foot. Even many supporters of target grades will concede that it is statistically unsound to apply averages as expectations to individuals, that they place an undue weight on Key Stage Two attainment, and that there is a lack of research to indicate their effectiveness. In spite of this, they cannot get beyond the sneaking suspicion that removing them would be dangerous, since it seems that they must raise standards overall by being aspirational and that dispensing with them would somehow betoken a lack of ambition for students.

This could not have been further from the case for us. As I have outlined in my narratives, far from signalling a lack of ambition, it was our ambitious aims for students which motivated us to stop using target grades. Furthermore, it is not in any way that we do not care about qualifications; in fact, determination for our students’ results to be as strong as possible played a very significant role in making me keen to make the change. To be clear, I doubt the removal of target grades will have a direct impact on pushing exam results higher, but I do anticipate and plan for it to contribute to more rigorous assessment and a more fruitful learning culture. I believe these things, in their turn, will lead to better grades, so the effect on results should be indirect. This conviction that we would have higher standards without target grades was what got the case against them onto the front foot and changed our perspective, so we were seeing the targets as an obstacle to progress rather than as a symbol of aspiration, or even as a necessary evil. We had reached the point where, instead of worrying about the risk of getting rid of target grades, we were asking ourselves if we could afford to keep them.

That said, the decision we have taken is a bet, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about it. Like all bets, it could cost us; there is a possibility that staff expectations and/or student motivation could drop. If that happens we will need to identify the problem, act quickly, and I will have to eat my words, but I don’t think that is likely. Standards seem to have risen since we removed teacher appraisal targets based on exam results data a few years ago, and also since we stopped grading individual pieces of work, so we have cause for confidence in taking the next logical step and removing target grades. I expect it to free us up to think more about what we are teaching and how we can do it better, and to remove a straitjacket so students can make the most of each assessment opportunity. I hope that in a few years we will wonder why we ever had them in the first place.

Image found here and labelled as available for noncommercial reuse.