Now it’s time for the Covid cohort to seize the day, go out and shine

Now the dust of an extraordinary examinations season is starting to settle, children are planning their futures with renewed optimism. The uncertainty wrought by a doomed algorithm and the failure of Ofqual and politicians to foresee its obvious excesses is starting to fade.

Issues remain, of course, such as the Btec fiasco and the funding now necessary for sixth-form colleges and universities to cope with the upsurge, but most young people will have a sense of destiny and purpose after an unsettling week or two.

There are already murmurings that this Covid generation has somehow been blessed, as exams have not been able to play their usual role of sifting the educational wheat from the chaff; that they have benefited from the generosity of teachers who want the best possible outcomes for them; that they have been particularly charitable over the GCSE “pass” threshold, where the rate is 9 percentage points up.

Higher A-level grades mean 55,000 additional applicants may get their first-choice universities, helped by a government that had little option but to lift the cap on places, even in areas such as medicine and veterinary science.

So, will these children always be the fortuitous Covid cohort that benefited from a global crisis? Employers will naturally ask if that certificate from 2020 is truly comparable with another applicant for an apprenticeship or job.

University lecturers will inevitably bemoan the dearth of prior knowledge presented by their latest, and much enlarged, undergraduate intake – they do at the best of times. Sixth form colleges will ask if so many should really be starting higher-level courses.

Dropout levels in higher and further education are predicted to climb, giving ammunition to those who doubt the true worth of this Covid cohort. Perhaps, when we go under the knife for that vital operation, we will wonder if the scalpel is held by one of the surgeons fortunate to get to medical school all those years ago. Yet we should be grateful for the Covid generation in exposing the fallacies of the system that has largely held sway since industrial times. Our long acceptance that any public examination system should be built on indiscriminate statistical thresholds, and that school isn’t valuable unless a proportion of children nosedive, is under renewed scrutiny. Perhaps far too many, even in government, feel that qualifications are only worthy if faceless statistics can earmark a good proportion for failure.

2020 was not a one-off; algorithms always underpin examination gradings and, historically, those who defend them have benefited. Yet there’s a sense that the exams system should be re-engineered to recognise what every young person knows, understands and is able to do, aligned to the demands of the modern workplace. Deciding children’s place in the world based on arbitrary statistical cut-offs is a less acceptable notion now than it was before Ofqual published its algorithm.

‘We should be grateful for the Covid generation in exposing the fallacies of the system’

If anything, the Covid generation has shown us that the mantras trotted out by politicians should always be challenged. We must avoid grade inflation at all costs, we are told. But why shouldn’t every young person be treated according to their merits?

As for the Covid generation, no one will ever know if the Covid generation truly deserved the grades they have been awarded. But most will seize the opportunities they have been given, and carry a healthy scepticism for pre-determining statistics and politicians who govern by platitude.

Those of us who have worked in education for any great length hold an unswerving faith in the ability of young people to shine, as long as they are given the opportunity, and this Covid cohort may well turn out to be one of our finest generations.