Grade Awarding 2021 - a thread.
1. For pupils and parents; it sounds daft but there isn’t much you can control right now. Teacher will play the main role in awarding grades, and there may well be some time or formal exam for subjects. But we don’t know exactly what yet.

2. What we do know is that all work pupils have done, their resilience over such a difficult time, their drive to keep going will make a difference to them. It’s never been more important for pupils to keep going, and keep engaging with the provision a school provides.
3. To our pupils? Have faith that the work you are doing will pay off. Please don’t lose heart right now. We love you lots and we all want you to excel. We are always here for you.
4. For school leaders - we need to build a year story. Right now they need a narrative that stresses the need to keep engaging in lessons. A letter every two weeks won’t get that job done. It’s never been more that pupils and parents feel connected to a school and we have clear
5. Communications cycles. Media - twitter/YouTube etc are vital tools for keeping our pupils and parents connected to school. This news cycle is vital for building a cultural expectation of what will happen when pupils set foot again in our school buildings.
6. Leader also need to consider what the next 16 school weeks look like. There will be an ‘exam season’ just not full of exams. At the point of return how will we assess pupils so they are in the best possible position? And do this without overwhelming or overworrying pupils.
7. Teachers need to keep teaching curriculum content. Where pupils are and where they need to go must follow our curricula, and it has been made clear that we may assess pupils based on where they are. We also need to support teachers whilst they are delivering remotely (and may
8. we’ll be feeling the fatigue of that sooner rather than later). Teachers need leaders to build a strong narrative to hang their ‘we keep going folks’ day to day lessons on. And we need to avoid placing them in front of parental grade pressure.
9. As always we need to take a step back from ofqual/DFE noise and focus on the day to day things we can control. Pupils, parents and staff need to feel supported, and knee jerk reaction to the consultation does help (whist we recognise flaws in any solution anyone proposes.)
10. I suppose we need to answer these questions; a) are we comfortable with our year 11 delivery, and do we know of the pupils have really learnt what we’ve taught them? b) are school leaders considering their year 11 return strategy, and where appropriate assessment fits in?
11. c)How do we build a communication cycle so no Year 11 pupils or parents feel left behind? And perhaps most importantly, d) how do we keep the focus on the day to day job? We can do this. 👍🤞

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An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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