Learning the lessons of the exams fiasco

The release of GCSE results on Thursday had threatened to turn into a complete fiasco for the Government. Schools were preparing for a repeat of the chaos surrounding A-level results last week, but with thousands more students subjected to the downgrading of their marks by an apparently capricious algorithm.

Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, will be hoping that the decision yesterday to reverse course and permit teacher-assessed grades to stand after all, for A-levels and GCSES, will draw a line under the issue. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case. Relying on the grades given by teachers is in itself an imperfect solution, which will invite grade inflation while still resulting in some students receiving worse marks than they hoped for. There is no simple way to award grades for exams that students were not permitted to sit.

But there is now another pressing question facing the Government: how on earth did ministers get in this mess? Certainly after events in Scotland, where the First Minister was forced into a similar U-turn, and arguably before that, it should have been obvious that the algorithm used to “standardise” results would lead to outcomes that were deemed unfair. Yet it was only at the eleventh hour that Mr Williamson announced his “triple lock” to mitigate some of the impact. Then even that fell apart under scrutiny, leading to yesterday’s embarrassing climbdown.

Why was this not foreseen? And if ministers did believe the original system was fairer, as they had claimed, why was more not done to defend it? It is not as if the stakes are low. Young people have too often been treated as an afterthought in this pandemic, their schooling disrupted and their futures jeopardised by policy-making that has rarely appeared to take account of their interests. Mr Williamson is ultimately responsible for reopening schools in full next month, which he must ensure goes ahead without disruption.

The least the public is entitled to expect from the Government is competence, and there is an evident concern among Conservative backbenchers that it has not been forthcoming. When the perception is allowed to spread that ministers are drifting from crisis to crisis, responding to events rather than in command of them, it can be very difficult to rebuild credibility. We hope the lessons of this imbroglio are learnt, and learnt quickly.