As a classroom teacher I had many conversations about flight paths and the validity of GCSE target grades.
The data we were presented with at times did not seem to match the evidence of potential we could see in the classroom from formative assessment, and I was often approached by students who themselves could not understand why they had been given what seemed like an unachievable goal to them.
Don’t get me wrong, I was always eager to receive the informative list of numbers that would form the basis of my expectations for the year. It would inform my teaching and learning activities and be a useful tool for tracking and measuring the performance of my classes. But it always came with some question marks for me too.
In educational terms, flight paths refer to the predicted trajectory of a student's academic progress over time. This is based on their past academic performance which is often KS2 data.
