Best result in exam chaos? Get our kids back to learning
YOUNGSTERS have been enduring a punishing, bewildering time. For months, the education system has been paralysed, with most schools shut and normal teaching suspended. Online learning is not an adequate substitute, nor can it provide the social interaction that is a vital part of growing up.
Remarkably, it is still not clear that schools will reopen in September, due to a mix of trade union militancy and Government inertia. A continued lockdown in this sector would be a disgrace. It would not only inflict further damage on the economy by preventing many parents from working, but also undermine the future life chances of pupils left in limbo.
Even before that, there is a more immediate potential crisis. Today sees the publication of A-level results, a vital annual exercise that determines the fate of thousands of school leavers. For university applicants, it is a particularly important rite of passage as they will learn if they have won a place at their chosen institution.
But this year the ritual will be very different. Because of the schools lockdown from March, no exams were held. So exam board Ofqual has calculated the results using a computer algorithm, based on a pupil’s past and predicted grades, as well as each school’s performance over the past three years.
FOR ALL the supposed technological sophistication, it is not a method that inspires confidence in its subtlety or fairness.
Indeed, the reliance on this kind of model has already led to a fiasco in Scotland, where the Qualifications Authority downgraded 125,000 results from teachers’ estimates in the Scottish equivalent of A levels.
News of the mass downgrade provoked a public outcry, especially as the pupils who were most heavily penalised were those from schools in areas of the highest deprivation.
According to one analysis, the pass rate for pupils from disadvantaged schools was lowered by 15.2 per cent, whereas the rate in the most affluent schools fell by just 6.9 per cent. “Judge me by my work, not my postcode,” read one angry slogan.
So embittered were the protests that the Edinburgh government, controlled by the SNP, performed a humiliating climbdown, when the beleaguered Education Minister John Swinney announced that all downgraded results would be replaced by the original teacher estimates. Today, the London government faces the prospect of an even bigger political controversy, since 40 per cent of English results are likely to be downgraded, compared with 25 per cent in Scotland.
Speaking of the danger faced by the Cabinet, one Tory backbencher said, “If it turns into a Scottish-style disaster, there will be a huge groundswell that will force them to back down.”
But the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is deeply reluctant to go down the newlyadopted Scottish route of using teachers’ estimates, fearing that such an approach could lead to serious grade inflation.
To avert a wave of outrage in England and provide reassurance, he has devised a so-called “triple lock”, whereby pupils will be able to claim whichever is the highest result from the trio of today’s calculated grade, their recent mock exams or a resit in the autumn.
The “triple lock” was attacked yesterday as “panicked and chaotic”. Certainly ministers can be accused of dilatoriness in only coming up with a workable solution 36 hours before the publication of the results. In addition, the pledge of autumn resits could involve further long delays for applicants, with no guarantee that any university place will kept open for them. Even worse, the use of mock result shows no recognition that these tests lack the authority and consistency of real exams.
AS Geoff Barton of the headteachers’ union put it yesterday: “Mocks aren’t a set of exams which all conform to the same standards. The clue is in the name ‘mock’.”
Yet for all such valid criticism, the Government should be granted some leeway. Given the absence of exams during the lockdown, there is no perfect model for assessment.The pragmatic strategy of calculated grades, backed up by the triple lock, is probably the best that can be achieved.
The row should act as a spur for a swift return to normality. All studies show the risks of infection in schools are almost non-existent, while it is profoundly unjust to charge students over £9,000-a-year in tuition fees if universities are still not functioning properly.
The best reward for today’s pupils and school-leavers would be the reopening of education.
‘Mocks aren’t exams that conform to same standards: clue is in the name’