Year 11 September 2023: New Bands and MEGs – Setting high expectations at KS4 with Alps (England and International)

This article refers to your KS4 cohorts for 2023.24 onwards, and importantly your Year 11 cohort in 2023.24. It applies to England and International.  

It contains important information regarding a re-banding of Key Stage 4 analysis in Connect. This has resulted in band changes and therefore MEG changes for your current Year 11 students (September 2023). 

IMPORTANT: A number of these students (new Year 11) are likely to change bands and some will change MEGs as a result. The last section of this article guides you through how to update MEGs in the Connect system. However, the new banding has not been applied retrospectively and therefore it will not affect your outgoing Year 11 cohort receiving results in August 2023. 

You can use our spreadsheet to import your new Year 11 students and immediately see the impact this change will have on their bands and on their MEGs. The spreadsheet is attached to this article – scroll to bottom of the page to download. 

The new bands will be applied to your incoming KS4 cohorts. You are less likely to have generated MEGs for these students.

Recalibrating our prior attainment bands and Minimum Expected Grades (MEGs) for students with KS2 scaled scores.

In February 2022 the DfE published the amended definitions of low, middle and high prior attainment to reflect KS2 scaled scores. Consequently, far fewer pupils have started secondary schools as High Prior Attainers (HPAs) whilst the percentage of Low Prior Attainers (LPAs) has increased nationally.

Why are we re-banding?

At Alps, we have traditionally had three High Prior Attainment bands. The DfE re-setting of the HPA bar at 110+ has meant that currently we only have two. Consequently, this has made it problematic to have sufficiently differentiated MEGs for HPA students.

Following the 2022 Results, the DFE published their 2021-22 Transition Matrices. The KS2 scaled score banding provided 3 HPA bands, 4 MPA bands and 3 LPA bands.

Note: The Transition Matrices are available at https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables#subjectTabs-createTable. 

We have used this DfE pattern to determine our new banding structure. It means that any analysis of progress in Alps will be a good fit with the DfE Transition Matrices.

Our new KS4 Prior Attainment bands and the MEPs and MEGs.

What you need to do in September 

1. In Connect Data, roll over your students as usual between Year 10 and Year 11
2. This will regenerate the MEGs – your Year 11 students will now have new MEGs based on the new banding structure
3. You can now export your MEGs. You may upload these into your MIS and therefore you would need to overwrite any existing MEGs.
4. Ensure that teaching staff are aware of the implications of the re-banding and know the latest MEGs for their students.
5. Ensure students are involved in discussions around these new MEGs.

Gradepoints

1. Any Year 10 gradepoints that you have uploaded during 2022.23 for your Year 11 students will remain on the old banding structure. If you want to use any as comparison gradepoints across Year 11 2023.24, you should clone the gradepoint in the new Academic Year.
2. Your value-added analysis for these gradepoints is likely to shift.
3. One key gradepoint might be your end of Year 10 summer predictions – consider re-entering this as a gradepoint at the start of Year 11
4. Once published these gradepoints will be analysed against the new banding structure and the new MEGs.

To clone your Year 11 gradepoints:

1. Export grades from Connect Data from the Year 10 monitoring point
2. Create a new monitoring point from these grades at the start of September.
3. Publish to Connect

Download the re-banding Spreadsheet here