A-level students are victims of a farce Gavin Williamson had five months to prevent
One day, the pandemic will be over, and face masks and sanitisers and alert levels and Rishi’s dishes will all be a memory. But the Covid Class of 2020 will still have their A-level and GCSE exam grades on their life’s records. Some will have lost places on degrees, or training, and their lives will have been changed. Others will be struggling to explain to future employers why their results nosedived at age 18. All will carry the fallout of Gavin Williamson’s lamentable decision-making.
Every teacher takes exam results seriously. It’s one of the main reasons why they work 50 hours a week planning and delivering lessons, putting on extra unpaid revision classes, marking late into the night. It’s why even ordinary results days are agony. That is another reason why this year’s A-level fiasco is unforgivable and, if it continues into GCSEs, will become a full-blown scandal.
Williamson has known since March that despite exams being cancelled in England, somehow every child would still get a grade. He knew that because he was the one who dictated it would be so. That was five months ago. And while I don’t doubt he is as exhausted as the rest of us, frankly he only had two jobs during this time: keep schools going and don’t mess up exam results. Amazingly, he screwed up both.
Related: Gavin Williamson under pressure to resign over A-level results 'fiasco'
Even the greatest mathematicians in the world can’t write an algorithm that can perfectly predict exams that no one sat. No computer can know who would have spent their final weeks cramming. No equation can say which student would have panicked.
It was nevertheless worth trying something. Not giving any grades at all would have unfairly limited young people’s future progression. Granting teacher-predicted scores would have almost doubled top grades, meaning some universities and employers would have needed to give places by lotteries, or defer large numbers of students. So in a world of terrible options, calculating a rough grade was not itself a stupid idea.
But there are two fundamental problems. First, the guesses had to be based on too little information, making them too unreliable. Ofqual itself thinks that, even in the best circumstances, it was getting no more than two qualifications in three right. No one was told how poor the guesses would be until Ofqual revealed its technical document on results day.
On Thursday, results day, we learned the top grades had been inflated most in private schools, because of technical reasons related to small cohort sizes. And that yes, it did look as if some young people had been given harsher grades than expected, including in some cases being pulled down into the fail grade “U” category.
In these circumstances it was absurd for the prime minister to tell the world the results were “robust”. At best, the A-level grades, and in all likelihood the GCSE results expected on 20 August, are an educated guess. Some honesty would have helped.
Related: 'Punishment by statistics': the father who foresaw A-level algorithm flaws
The second mistake was on appeals. How did it get to 11pm – one hour before schools were due to get their results – before the government whipped out a made-up appeals process that would apparently take into account a set of entirely unregulated mock exams set and marked differently in each school? Williamson might as well have told students: you can have one of three options – a moderated grade, a resit in the autumn, or a spin on a tombola.
There were plenty of alternatives. If the government had admitted the tentative nature of the results, and provided every student with the teacher predictions, rank, and their calculated grade, it would have been easier for universities to make reasoned judgments. If schools had received the results earlier, pre-appeals could have been made. More generosity could have been built into the system. None of this has happened.
When GCSE grades are revealed on Thursday the situation could be even worse. GCSEs are taken by thousands more students than A-levels, and the cliff-edge difference between getting a 4 (considered a “pass”) and any lower grade is dramatic.
Ultimately, young people have been caught in a farce presided over by an education secretary who let an obviously problematic results day go ahead with no clear plan and no appeals process. How did that happen? Civil servants busy on Brexit? On holiday? Did the exams watchdog not have the bottle to flag problems? I can’t fathom it.
But none of these questions help the Lilys, Matts, or Aatiyahs, or any one of thousands of young people, to understand how a baffling set of grades tanked their future and they weren’t given a clear way to challenge it.
When the pandemic is over and the counting done, Williamson will pull a sad face and say he did everything in his powers to wrap his arm around young people. But he didn’t. And every student, and their families, burned by these grades will remember it the next time they go to the ballot box.
