Students will get teachers’ grading in exams ‘debacle’ U-turn
A-LEVEL and GCSE grades for students in Wales will be awarded on the basis of teacher assessments, the Welsh Government has said.
The U-turn follows claims from headteachers and unions that the country’s system for allocating exam results for A-levels unfairly discriminated against some students.
In Wales, 42% of A-level results predicted by teachers were lowered by Qualifications Wales, leading to claims that its algorithm, which took into account the past performances of schools, had unfairly downgraded some pupils.
Yesterday, Education Minister Kirsty Williams – the sole Liberal Democrat MS in the Welsh Labour-led government – confirmed that A-level, AS-level,
GCSE, Skills Challenge Certificate and Welsh Baccalaureate grades in Wales will now be awarded on the basis of centre assessment grades.
Ms Williams said: “Working with Qualifications Wales and (exams board) WJEC, we have sought an approach which provides fairness and balances out differences in the standards applied to judgments in schools.
“Given decisions elsewhere, the balance of fairness now lies with awarding centre assessment grades to students, despite the strengths of the system in Wales.
“I am taking this decision now ahead of results being released this week, so that there is time for the necessary work to take place.
“For grades issued last week, I have decided that all awards in Wales will also be made on the basis of teacher assessment.
“For those young people for whom our system produced higher grades than those predicted by teachers, the higher grades will stand.
“Maintaining standards is not new for 2020, it is a feature of awarding qualifications every year in Wales, and across the UK.
“However, it is clear that maintaining confidence in our qualifications whilst being fair to students requires this difficult decision.
“These have been exceptional circumstances, and in due course I will be making a further statement on an independent review of events following the cancellation of this year’s exams.
“Other awarding bodies across the UK are involved in determining the approach to vocational qualifications. This continues to be the case but it is important that I give assurance to GCSE, AS and A-level students at the earliest opportunity.”
Hundreds of people gathered outside the Senedd in Cardiff Bay over the weekend to protest over the grading system, while Plaid Cymru said it was discussing launching legal action against Wales’ exams watchdog.
Reacting to the news yesterday, Plaid Cymru’s shadow education minister Sian Gwenllian said: “The real victory belongs to the young people of Wales who have demonstrated better leadership and decorum than their government.
“Whilst it is regretful that this U-turn didn’t come last week instead of putting students through so much unnecessary uncertainty and anxiety, I offer my congratulations to the young people who have led this campaign so ably.
“There should be a full investigation into this debacle and the Welsh Government should apologise to students, teachers and schools for what they’ve put them through over the past few weeks.
“Never again should the professionalism and integrity of our teachers and the hard work of our students be called into question. For today, let us celebrate that justice has prevailed.”
Eithne Hughes, director of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Cymru, said: “We welcome the Government’s decision to put an end to the grading fiasco by allowing students to receive teacher-assessed grades rather than grades which have been moderated down.
“Students, parents, and teachers will breathe a sigh of relief after days of confusion and palpable upset at the anomalies thrown up by an algorithm in which the individual learner was lost.
“This decision will, of course, mean that there is grade inflation this year, but that is a small price to pay for remedying the manifest injustices produced by the statistical model used to moderate grades.”
Suzy Davies, the Welsh Conservatives’ shadow education minister, said: “This has been an exceptional time, and this news will come as a very welcome relief for the thousands of A-level students who last week were looking at grades lower than they were predicted to receive.
“It will also be a relief to pupils expecting results this week as well as an acknowledgement of quite how much effort teachers put into this.”
The U-turn comes after headteachers across Wales attacked the Welsh Government for the injustices suffered by their pupils in last week’s A-level results.
Among them was Iwan Pritchard, head of Ysgol Bro Edern in Cardiff, who wrote to the WJEC, outlining why this year’s original process for arriving at grades had been unjust, and especially so for his school.
He expressed astonishment that, among other grades dropped, his head of art – a WJEC A-level principal examiner for art and design, with years of experience – saw two of her grades slashed from a C to U.
Cardiff ’s newest Welsh-medium high school Bro Edern only posted its first set of results in 2019 and, as such, should have been looked at differently when arriving at grades in the original system which took into account historic past performance,
Mr Pritchard’s letter says.
“We are a school with only one year of A-level and Level 3 results, with huge differences between last year’s cohort and this year’s cohort. It is very unfair to award pupils grades this year based on one year of results only,” he noted in the letter, which was written ahead of yesterday’s U-turn.
Some pupils had been marked down four grades by examiners and around four in 10 A-level grades were lowered across Wales when results came out last week. After the initial furore over grades, the Welsh Government had already announced no A-levels would be graded below an AS in that subject already achieved.
In the case of Bro Edern, more than 50% of individual subject A-level grades in the school’s year 13 and more than 30% of AS results for year 12s were lowered by the algorithm used to “standardise” a range of data, leading to Mr Pritchard to warn it would affect students for “the rest of their lives”.
Headteachers last night welcomed the minister’s announcement – but feared the initial fiasco would still hit some pupils’ university applications.
Laura Doel, director of headteachers’ union NAHT Cymru, said: “In the current circumstances it is right to trust the professional judgement of the people who know their students best, their teachers.
“NAHT Cymru made direct representations to the minister last week calling for her to revert to the centre assessment grades when it was first identified that there was a problem with the algorithm used by Qualifications Wales.
“Although we welcome the decision, we don’t yet know what this delay will mean for students who have already missed out on their first choice of university. This will undoubtedly load more and more difficulty onto universities and their capacity to meet all of the demand for places that will now inevitably come their way. For them, the problem is far from over.
“Everyone knew that this was going to be a difficult time and there is no perfect method by which to award grades, however, this decision will mean students expecting their GCSE results can have confidence that they will not experience the same unfairness or disadvantage as their older peers.”