A-level and GCSE grades will be ‘most generous ever’

Regulator says examiners will be more lenient after pandemic yet grades will be lower than last year

GCSES and A-levels this year will get the “most generous grades ever”, England’s chief exam regulator has said, despite the pledge to return to pre-pandemic grading standards.

Dr Jo Saxton, the chief regulator of Ofqual, said: “I must be clear that whilst on the one hand this will be the most generously graded series of examinations ever... the results will be lower than we saw in 2021”.

Ms Saxton said that “grading this year will make sense for this year’s students,” adding that “results will reflect a staging post between 2021 and 2019”.

In a speech at the Confederation of School Trusts’ conference in Birmingham, Dr Saxton warned schools that they would see “lower” results than the 2021 teacher-assessed grades, but that they would be the highest “ever” since pre-pandemic grading.

“Your schools are likely to find their results are lower than in 2021 when exams did not go ahead,” she told the school leaders. However, she added: “Ofqual is asking the exam boards to set grade boundaries to reflect this pandemic context to avoid disadvantaging those students who might otherwise just miss out on a higher grade.”

Grade inflation last year pushed results to a record high, with almost double the proportion of top marks awarded compared to before the pandemic. For example, 44.8 per cent of A-levels in the UK were awarded an A or A* last year, compared with 25.5 per cent in 2019, which was the last year that students took formal examinations.

While this year has seen a return to in-person examinations, Dr Saxton told the conference that she wanted to see students receive qualifications that are not “devalued to the extent that they could not serve progression or employment purposes”.

“It does remain the right thing to start to return to normality... We want to get back to pre-pandemic grading,” she said, adding that students “really, really want to do their exams”.

“They want to prove themselves in what they consider to be the fairest form of assessment, which is answering the same questions as their peers at the same time, in the same way and marked by impartial adults.”

She made the remarks as Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, said girls “do like hard maths” in an apparent critique of another Government tsar’s previous comments about girls’ dislike of taking A-level physics.

Also speaking at the conference yesterday, Dame Rachel said she had opened Sir Isaac Newton, a maths and science sixth-form free school in Norwich, adding: “I just want to tell you that in my view, girls like hard maths.

“And the girls in the Big Ask [her survey of children post-pandemic] that I

‘Ofqual is asking exam boards to set grade boundaries to reflect the pandemic context’

spoke to talked about the importance of female STEM role models, that was more the issue going into the classroom when there were all boys in physics, it wasn’t that they couldn’t do hard maths.”

Earlier this year, Katharine Birbalsingh, the Government’s chair of social mobility commission and head teacher, said “physics isn’t something girls tend to fancy” and that “there’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do”.

Dame Rachel added that in the Big Ask survey, when she asked why children were anxious about examinations, she found that “it wasn’t about exams and continual assessment and it wasn’t a lack of desire to work hard”.

“They were worried about the highstakes nature of them in terms of progressing to the next stage and the ability to get a job.”