Results must be fair and celebrated
IT WAS never going to be the Alevel results day anyone wanted, but – amid the chaos and anger over results – our students and their teachers must be commended and their achievements celebrated.
They deserve no less in what has been a terrible few months for schools and the young people locked out of classrooms and locked down at home when they should have been launching into the future.
With exams cancelled and grades arrived at by a process and algorithm branded “unfair” and “arbitary” by some head teachers, it has been a results day like no other.
Indeed, the results will change over the next few days after a lastminute review by Welsh Government ruled no A-level grades can be lower than AS grades for that subject a student has already got.
After insisting the model for arriving at grades was robust, the Welsh Government was forced to backtrack after an outcry in Scotland and England led to reviews there.
Exam regulator Qualifications Wales, exam board the WJEC and the Welsh Government say they had little time to act in unprecedented times and the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic. Yet they had months to come up with an arrangement and data model that was fair and transparent. Exams were cancelled in March. It has been in no-one’s best interests that government has had to respond to public anger at the very last moment, the late afternoon before results were handed out. Potentially thousands of A-level results will now be changed to reflect AS grades last year.
There is still much anger to come over AS marks and as the row rumbles on it does not bode well for GCSE results next Thursday.
The Education Minister said she will act again if any actions across the border might put our GCSE students at a disadvantage.
The problem is, if we need to tinker with the model arrived at for awarding grades, that suggests the entire model may be flawed. The Scottish Government boldly decided to scrap its model and return to accepting the teachers’ assessed grades. England says no student will have A-level grades lower than mocks – which are, of course, graded by teachers.
It is a shame the government, which has tasked our teaching profession with building the new curriculum, did not also trust them when it came to the crucial matter of arriving at assessed exam grades – based after all on previous work and exams.