The challenge of teacher assessment and no public exams for international pupils – How have schools met the needs of international students studying online as well as in the classroom with regards to A Level/IB outcomes?

Clearly, recent A-Level and IB results would suggest that pupils and schools have adapted incredibly well during the pandemic, but significant challenges faced all schools delivering often a mix of online and face-to-face teaching to their international students during this time.

Caroline Nixon , International Director of Boarding Schools’ Association (BSA) provides the following overview of the challenges, most particularly for international students: “The difficulties that all students have experienced with learning this year are perhaps especially true for international students who have been studying online at home, often in a different time zone and without meaningful support from those around them, who are unfamiliar with the British curriculum, assessment models or even the language. Assessment too may have been particularly challenging for their teachers who typically will have had a shorter time in which to get to know their international pupils before lockdowns began.”

Pat Moores, Director of UK Education Guide
However, as Caroline also points out, the speed of movement to online learning was impressive and there were some academic benefits for some international students from the move online:

“For some international students, online learning has actually been easier to access: recorded lessons and online resources are always available to go through at a student’s own pace and the cultural issues that arise when living in another country do not have to be dealt with. Clearly the richness of the boarding experience is lost if a student doesn’t live here but looked at in terms of exam results the negative effect originally feared hasn’t materialised.”

However, as Gareth Collier , Principal at Cardiff Sixth Form College [part of the Dukes Education Group] – notes, it is important to not just focus on the grade outcomes from exam results in 2020 and 2021: “Perhaps the best outcome for international students is that their A-Level courses are delivered in their entirety so allowing them the best platform for success in their undergraduate studies. We focused on delivering the full syllabus online or in hybrid format, despite the reduction in content and examination changes. The knowledge and application skills are vital if students, already at a disadvantage in terms of language, are to succeed at university.”

Some schools have also reported that it has proved a challenge for some international students to reintegrate into boarding school life on return to school after a lengthy time away and there seems an overlap between those students struggling to reintegrate into boarding life and those that found online, remote learning suited them.

The speed of the move online and the selection of Microsoft teams as the preferred delivery platform was also not without difficulties.

Teams is not naturally set up for ‘asynchronous’ learning and therefore to avoid around the clock teaching, many schools recorded lessons for pupils in radically different time zones.

These challenges were particularly felt in China where there is no access to YouTube and so many schools had to spend some time setting up VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) to ensure their chinese pupils could reliably access recorded lessons and this led to a delay in some pupils being able to access some recorded lessons.

Brooke House College , with pupils coming from 69 different countries, faced particular challenges with pupils in almost every global time zone. However, the College actually provides an excellent case study of how it developed robust TAGs (Teacher Assessment Grades) to inform GCSE and A-Level results.

Brooke House offered a sophisticated form of pupil assessment that required significant planning not only logistically, but also to make sure all pupils were treated the same whether they were still in the UK or at home, overseas.

Indeed, exams were actually still a core part of the assessment process and overall, the College offered a combination of mock examinations, previous work from non-lockdown terms and past paper practice papers.

Where pupils were still at the College, examinations were still taken in the summer term as they would have undertaken in normal, pre-pandemic times in a Covid-safe environment. For international pupils out of the country, the College used a combination of British Council offices, educational agent offices and online platforms to ‘invigilate’ pupils undertaking the assessments.

As Mike Oliver, Principal at Brooke House, adds, “We were confident that the assessment material we entered into the evidence folders was produced by an individual pupil under examination conditions.”

Of course, this created a significant extra workload at Brooke House College, but the results back up the rigorous approach it took: “We had work sampled at A-level and GCSE by at least three examination boards for quality assurance purposes. None of our TAGs (Teacher Assessment Grades) were altered, so we felt vindicated that our processes and procedures were robust and that none of our international (or local) pupils suffered in terms of outcomes and either entry to the sixth form or more importantly to university,” adds Mike.

So, plenty of challenges to ensure not only that international pupils had ongoing access to high-quality teaching during the pandemic, but most importantly that they weren’t disadvantaged by being overseas. The feedback from the sector seems to be, we are exhausted, but all efforts have been made to make sure the geographic location of the student has not had a major impact on the quality of teaching and support offered.

Of course, no one wants to go back to this style of learning again and no one is suggesting it has been as good as face-to-face teaching, but schools have certainly risen to the challenge.

Pat Moores is the Director of UK Education Guide, an independent resource on UK secondary schools options for UK and international families.

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