Education disaster must not be repeated
After the 18 months they have endured, with schools closed for a good deal of the time and exams cancelled, it would be churlish not to congratulate A-level pupils on their excellent results and commiserate with those who fell short of what they expected. But the award of top marks to 45 per cent of students, based on teacher assessments, is a worrying development. Even before the pandemic there was concern about so-called grade inflation undermining the gold standard supposedly provided by A-levels. In the 1960s, just 10 per cent of passes were awarded an A. By 2019, this had risen to around 25 per cent. The GCSE results out tomorrow in England are likely to show the same trend.
Over the years, successive governments have sought to reinforce the credibility of the exams in a variety of ways, with each part of the UK (since education is a devolved matter) taking different approaches. In England, an A* was introduced to distinguish the exceptionally clever from the rest. Even these have quadrupled in four years.
It is impossible to accept that the Covid cohort of pupils is so much brighter than their immediate predecessors, any more than the latter were infinitely cleverer than children in the 1970s. But it is easy to see how teachers, aware of the miserable time their charges have had, erred on the side of generosity in reaching their assessments.
The Government says the process was “fair”, though by that logic teacher assessment would remain for ever. It is natural that everyone should want to ameliorate the wretched experience of the Covid generation but is it really fair on them – or the next cohort – to pretend that everything is perfectly acceptable when clearly it isn’t?
Perversely, ministers who two years ago were fretting over grade inflation now say that the higher marks are fully deserved. Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary – who has, it appears, forgotten his own A-level results – has even indicated that teacher assessments may continue next year, thereby compounding the mistakes of the past two years with another.
The great failure of governance was to close the schools and abolish exams. The former decision led to the latter since independent and grammar schools were better at supplying online learning and therefore exams would have further disadvantaged children from less well-off backgrounds. With all adults who remain fearful that schools spread Covid offered two doses of the vaccine (and a winter booster), there is no reason for it to happen again.
Inevitably, though, there will be pressure to adjust the exam results of the next A-level group to reflect their experience of the pandemic and to prevent this year’s being too much out of kilter. Throughout much of the past three decades, the proportion of schoolchildren achieving the highest marks in GCSE exams grew every year but some tried to make out that standards were rising, not that marking was less rigorous. The results of the past two years, difficult as they have been, threaten to devalue the entire system. They also make it hard to measure the performance of British children against those in other countries in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
It is by no means clear what the Government intends to do next with schools, beyond what Mr Williamson described as following “a glide path back to normality” – whatever that means. What are the plans for helping pupils catch up with what they have missed? Will schools open for longer hours or on Saturdays or will teachers insist on the vaccination of senior pupils and expect them to wear masks? Will ministers confront the uncomfortable reality that the excessive A-level awards may assuage today’s students but end up penalising others in the future?
There is an unfortunate tendency to blame children for spreading Covid and seeing the closure of schools as a legitimate public health measure. It isn’t. It is a disaster and one that must not be repeated.