With five months to prepare, the A-level results fiasco is a scandal of the government’s own making
A-level results day is always fraught with drama.
Whether its moral panic of grade inflation, handwringing about the relative value of a university degree, or outrage over news stories being illustrated by delighted blonde girls jumping into the air with joy, results day “scandal” it’s a staple of the August news calendar.
This year is different. There is still outrage, but this week it is directed at a government that seems not to have factored the national assessments of millions of GCSE and A-level students into its pandemic response at any point over the past five months.
We have known since the schools were closed in March that this year’s cohort would be unable to attain their grades in the normal way. With an accidental experiment in mass home-schooling suddenly underway, which saw huge disparity in the level of education provided from different schools, cancelling national exams was the only sensible course of action.
That is where sense appears to have ended. With no exams, the plan was for teachers to assign grades, which would then be moderated centrally.
As we have already seen in Scotland, this process was disastrous The grades assigned by teachers (who, let us not forget, are themselves judged at least partly on the achievements of their pupils) were suspiciously generous — over 10 percentage points higher than in previous years, in Scotland and in England.
The exam regulator Ofqual was right to warn that relying on these predictions alone would lead to unfair grade inflation. The solution? Apply a standardisation formula to teacher predictions, based in part on the past performance of the school. If you were a high-achieving pupil in a low-performing school, your grades would be marked down.
Initially, around 125,000 Scottish grades were lowered. Unsurprisingly, the formula hit low-income students harder than those in more affluent areas where schools were stronger. It was essentially reverse social mobility — and the same looked set to happen with A-level results in England tomorow.
But after days of trying to defend its policy in the face of mass fury, the Scottish government U-turned spectacularly this week and announced that pupils could keep their teacher-predicted grades after all. Good news if you had a generous teacher, but desperately unfair for students who had genuinely worked hard and now face competition for university places from others whose grades have been inflated.
Now A-levels have seen a similar volte-face at the eleventh hour. It was announced yesterday that a downgrading formula will still be applied, but in what has been branded “choose your own grades”, students will get a choice: stick with their moderated predicted grades, revert to what they achieved in their mock exams earlier this year, or “twist” and take an optional exam in autumn.
The problems with this “triple-lock” system are clear. Moderated grades will still be influenced by the school’s past performance, disadvantaging less well-off pupils. Mock exams, meanwhile, vary hugely from school to school and do not meet consistent standards. So far, there is no guidance about what counts as a “valid mock”.
As for an optional autumn exam, details are scant. But given the question marks that still hang over whether schools will even be able to open for all pupils in September, not to mention the fact that A-level and GCSE pupils have had barely any face-to-face teaching since March, it is unclear how this will work. How universities will be expected to assign places based on exams that have not yet been taken is also a mystery.
We cannot expect an ideal solution that will be fair to everyone. What we should expect, however, is a government (and an education secretary) switched-on enough to realise that this is would be a major headache well in advance. The Department for Education has had five months to come up with an alternative system.
Officials could have introduced the idea of an autumn exam months ago, to give schools and pupils time to prepare. They could have designed an assessment framework based on coursework, perhaps with mini-exams held remotely throughout the summer, to take a snapshot of where pupils were.
Or they could have been really radical and voided demarcated grades entirely for this cohort, calling on universities and employers to use interviews as an alternative. These are, after all, “unprecedented times”, and however this year’s grades are decided, there will substantial doubts about them — so maybe the only fair thing to do is not give them out at all.
None of these are perfect, but with five months of preparation, something could have been worked out that was fair to the millions of young people whose future rests on this assessment process. Instead, it appears that the issue barely featured on the radar of politicians and officials until the Scotland fiasco, with the eventual fudge brought in literally hours before results day itself.
Education has taken a backseat throughout the government’s pandemic response, ranking below health, business, and even football on the list of priorities. So if this year’s results day is even more of a scandal than usual, it is a scandal entirely of the government’s making.
Main image credit: Getty