At the time of writing, the Tes newsroom is yet to get its teeth into tomorrow’s results for the new-look GCSEs, but over the next day or two we will endeavour to work out the national, regional and local pictures.

So, at the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, here are some thoughts on what is about to unfold.

Obviously, politicians will attempt to present the changes as a triumph. And there is, to be fair, a decent amount to admire about the new-style GCSEs, a brand which had been suffering something of a crisis for several years.

Ministers and their civil servants set out to create what is, in essence, an entirely new, and considerably harder, qualification - they have achieved that. There is indeed something in the argument that, as the Education Policy Institute said this morning, there is little point in having such exams if they fail to compete with the best in the world - and don’t command respect in the general public.

As part of this reinvention, the abolition of controlled assessment is probably no bad thing - it certainly removed an unwelcome whiff of immorality that surrounded the profession. And it is a good thing that the highest achievers will be further stretched and differentiated (in the 7-9 range).

But there are many negatives, too - and, at this juncture, they outweigh the positives. Most of these negatives relate to the rushed pace of reform, with little time for consultation, or the timely production of exam specifications and practice papers.

‘Shock and awe approach’

It is my hunch that this shock and awe approach, driven by one Michael Gove (remember him?) and his team, will leave more than a few high-performing, and possibly high-profile, comprehensives floundering around in parts of the league tables that are unfamiliar.

Late specifications and a lack of practice papers are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the consequences of pushing through these reforms. For example, the numerical grading system was “finessed” as recently as March this year, making it as clear as mud. A grade 4 (a “standard pass”) will be considered good enough for your students, but for a school, it looks likely only a 5 (a “strong pass”) will do when it comes to accountability measures.

Of course, there was logic behind the speed of the reforms and the hasty adoption of a numerical grading system: forcing the changes through didn’t give the established order - the Blob if you will - the time it needed to get its claws into the reforms and dilute them.

But in so doing, this haste could prove problematic for the kind of secondaries that Mr Gove was keen to promote: those that achieved top results in challenging circumstances.

These schools are nearly always finely tuned organisations, focused on getting their pupils through a distinct set of parameters. Change these parameters at the last moment, and it’s hard to recalibrate the school at speed. Those schools with wealthier intakes - be they comps, grammars or independents - have more wriggle room in which to manoeuvre.

I hope I’m wrong about this. But it would not be without irony if Gove’s reforms caused major problems for the very schools that he most admired.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at Tes. He tweets @Ed_Dorrell

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