Hands up anyone who can explain this school chaos
Amazing how each generation of children gets cleverer, isn’t it? An evolutionary feat which is all the more miraculous given an apparent inability among our young people to spell or add up. Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of pupils must have been feeling very clever indeed. Outstripping the unbelievable results of 2020, A-level marks went through the roof again, with 44.8 per cent getting an A grade and around a fifth awarded an A*. Almost 13,000 pupils achieved a perfect three A*s, four times the number who pulled off that eye-watering feat in 2019, the last year that externally marked exams were taken. The overall pass rate was a deafening 99.5 per cent.
Hang on, was no one allowed to fail? Was there no numbskull so fantastically useless and lazy in all the land that even his own teacher couldn’t bear to paint his abilities in a radiant light? Well, as it happens, there was one person in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who mucked up spectacularly. Gavin Williamson gets a U from me for being possibly the dimmest, least competent education secretary of all time.
“I wouldn’t give Williamson a U,” snaps one sixth-form teacher I know who has struggled to coach his pupils, often via a dodgy internet connection, for exams which schools were not allowed to call exams “because it will cause the students stress”. Yes, really. “Williamson gets an F from me,” he fumes. “He can F right off.”
Another teacher of A-levels is equally aghast. “Frankly, the period April to June 2021 was the most farcical of my 33-year teaching career,” she says. “Gavin Williamson didn’t just keep moving the goalposts. He picked them up, left the pitch, took away the ball, and told us to carry on.”
Yes, it’s Exam Fiasco 2. And the remake turns out to be even worse than the original. Cast your minds back to last year. A-level and GCSE students were in school until March, when the first lockdown was announced. They were only six weeks away from study leave. In Germany, formal public examinations went ahead as normal. After all, what could be more socially distanced than an exam hall? But the UK, either because of strong, belligerent teaching unions or a weak, cowardly Secretary of State (take your pick), was incapable of following the Germans’ sensible example. British exams could have been postponed till later in the summer and university applications delayed; unfortunately, that would have taken leadership and intelligent forward planning.
Even so, schools had reliable recent data from mocks and coursework on which to base exam grades. Surely, it was not beyond the wit of Gavin to use that information to arrive at fair results for millions of young people?
Ah, but the Secretary of State was worried that allowing teachers to assess their pupils would lead to “grade inflation”, which would be a very bad thing. So Ofqual, the exam regulator, moderated teachers’ predictions using an algorithm. It turned out to be every bit as successful as the mathematical model used by Professor Neil Ferguson who had forecast that, by now, we would have 100,000 Covid cases a day. A shockingly unrepentant Prof Ferguson said he was happy to be proved wrong “if it’s wrong in the right direction”.
“Wrong in the right direction” could be the mantra of our flailing Department of Education. Forced into an embarrassing U-turn last summer, when talented pupils in below-average schools were coshed by a statistical blunt instrument, the Ofqual results were rapidly rescinded and pupils awarded their highest predicted grades.
I understand that, in a consultation, many teachers recommended that formal examinations should resume this year, wisely anticipating this week’s debacle. But the Prime Minister ignored them, perhaps fearing adverse reactions if results dropped off from their delusional high or a backlash from the ever-unhelpful unions. Back in January (remarkably early to make such an important decision), Boris said exams would not go ahead. Instead, the Government plumped for the crowdpleasing option of assessment by teachers. Er, wasn’t that the very thing the Secretary of State warned in 2020 would lead to very bad grade inflation? Hands up anyone in class who can explain the logic at work here? Obviously, no school wanted to be seen to mark more harshly than its neighbour, so “generous assessments”, ahem, were inevitable. Guidance from exam boards (which still charged schools exorbitant fees, by the way) was sorely lacking. A-level papers were issued, but they were a mishmash of previous papers which a class could already have used for revision. Even if they hadn’t seen the paper, the exams which teachers weren’t allowed to call exams (too much stress, darling!) were put online for students to peruse at their leisure. They were then permitted to see the actual questions the week before, and there were no time constraints for producing the answers. As a consequence, the A-level results of 2021 inspire about as much confidence as the Zimbabwean dollar (inflation rate 557.21 per cent). No doubt, tomorrow’s GCSE results will reveal similar off-the-scale silliness. None of this is the children’s fault. Not at all. The adults are to blame. In a shameless attempt to deflect attention from his department’s poor decisions, Mr Williamson said yesterday that students “deserve to be rewarded” after a year of disruption. “Because of the extraordinary conditions we have faced as a country […], it would have been unfair on students [to let exams go ahead],” he wrote in these pages.
How do Gav’s nasal platitudes compensate those students who worked furiously hard to earn their top grades and who now see far less diligent classmates awarded the same? It makes a mockery of their efforts. The All Must Have Prizes approach may look like kindness, but it disguises a deeper cruelty. Teenagers who are not especially academic could now win a place at a university where they will flounder and drop out, incurring huge debts. With competition so fierce and grades so uniform, gifted students could miss out. Universities, which were already having trouble differentiating between candidates with a clean sheet of As, will now have to introduce their own exams to do the job that A-levels should have done.
It is very difficult to write honestly on this matter without being accused of undermining young people’s achievement. Having witnessed the demoralising effect of online teaching in my own family, I have nothing but sympathy for kids who have been the innocent casualties of a lockdown designed to protect their elders. When it comes to exams, though, I have to agree with John Nield, a former chief examiner at AQA. “Yes, students have had a horrible two years educationally,” he said, “but they know where they are at in the pecking order and they will be looking at the results, saying: ‘That’s not right, we don’t deserve that.’ It is belittling and demeaning to students to think they will accept this ‘everyone gets an A*’ approach.”
Where will it all end? Those of us who went to school in prehistoric times when BBC was a creditable result at A-level, earning you a place at a good university, will be shaking our heads in disbelief. I wonder how the Allison who revised around the clock, with only a break for a cheese and Branston sandwich (thanks, Mum!) to get a hard-earned AAB would have felt if almost half her year had been gifted the same grades.
Gavin Williamson has already hinted that exams may not be back to normal next year, or even the year after. While our international competitors pit their youngsters against the challenge of rigorous national assessment, the Secretary of State talks glibly of a “glide path” back to formal exams. My, what a long tail of excuses this Covid has!
Grade inflation is an evil because it devalues the currency of our education, undermining aspiration and true excellence. Those who get their results this week deserve huge congratulations for making it through an awful year. The children who come after deserve proper exams with credible results. We must not fail them.
The All Must Have Prizes approach may look like kindness, but it disguises a cruelty
Gavin Williamson: the only person this year to have mucked up their exams spectacularly