This summer, we made a significant change to how we report on student performance at Key Stage 3. After listening carefully to feedback from schools and reflecting on our own experiences, we’ve moved away from 9-1 GCSE-style grades (what we called National Distribution Grades, or NDGs) and introduced quintiles as our primary measure for KS3 assessment reporting.
The problem with “GCSE thinking”
The issues with using GCSE-style grades at KS3 had been building for some time. Schools were telling us that these grades were encouraging the wrong kind of focus – pushing teachers and students towards summative outcomes rather than the formative use of assessment that really drives learning forward.
We were seeing “GCSE thinking” creeping into KS3 – the use of flight paths, marks to next grade, and a focus on grade boundaries that has its place at KS4 but can be unhelpful when the priority should be curriculum mastery and deep learning. In some cases, these grades even seemed to act as a perceived ceiling on what students might achieve.
These grades also gave us only a limited picture of how our students were doing. Threshold measures told us how many students hit certain benchmarks, but they didn’t help us understand the full spread of cohort performance or track meaningful progress over time, either for individual pupils or at school level.
What we wanted to keep
Despite these problems, there were elements of our quantitative approach that schools valued and wanted to retain. The ability to benchmark performance of students relative to a the whole national cohort is critical, and a key strength of our assessments. Schools needed something that could support their understanding of both pupil and school performance over time, and they wanted a system that could still be used for reporting to students and parents.
The challenge was finding an approach that preserved these benefits while removing the unhelpful aspects of GCSE-style grading.
A different way of thinking about performance
Our solution was to move to quintiles – essentially dividing each cohort into five equal groups based on percentile rankings. Instead of asking “Did this student hit Grade 6?” we’re now asking “Where does this student sit within their cohort, and how is that position changing over time?”
This shift is more significant than it might first appear. Quintiles are relative measures that automatically adjust to the performance of each cohort. They give us a much clearer picture of where students sit in relation to their peers, and they make progress tracking far easier and more meaningful.
The power of progress
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this change is how it transforms our understanding of student progress. Rather than simply tracking how many of our students hit the grade 5 threshold, we can now see pupils moving up or down quintiles over time, showing how many of our students are making better or worse than average progress compared to the national cohort. We can identify students who are making significant progress and those who might need additional support.
This gives teachers and school leaders a much more nuanced view of what’s happening in their classrooms. A student might be consistently performing in the middle quintile, but if they’ve moved from the bottom quintile over the course of the year, that tells a very different story about their progress than a static grade would suggest. Equally important, it allows leaders to quickly identify pupils whose performance has dipped – students who might be sliding down quintiles and need additional support, something that was harder to spot with threshold-focused reporting.
Implementing the change
The early feedback from teachers and leaders has been striking. Many have told us that this new approach has revealed insights about their students’ performance that they simply couldn’t see before. The ability to see movement across quintiles – both upward progress and concerning dips – is giving them a much clearer picture of what’s really happening with student learning over time. Leaders can identify the schools whose pupils are struggling relative to the rest of the cohort, so they can act quickly to put in additional support where needed.
If you use the United Curriculum end-of-year assessments, from Summer 2026 we won’t generate 9-1 NDGs for our Year 7 and 8 assessments. We’d encourage you to learn from the success of our move to quintiles, and use the cohort percentile rankings in Smartgrade as the basis for your reporting.
How to continue to use 9-1 grades
However, we do recognise that some schools will continue to want GCSE-style grades even at KS3. If you do, you can apply national GCSE distributions – available from JCQ – to the cohort percentiles to calculate indicative 9-1 grades.
For example, if 7% of pupils nationally achieve a grade 9 in the subject, any of your pupils who achieve in the 94th percentile or above would be a grade 9. If 9% of pupils get a grade 8, that would be your pupils in percentiles 86 to 93, and so on.
Note that this methodology is only valid when applied to the national cohort – so use it on your cohort percentile rankings from Smartgrade, not just on your own class or year group. Unless you happen to have a perfectly representative group in your school, the top 7% in your class or year group won’t be the same as the top 7% nationally, so it wouldn’t be accurate to give them all a 9.