As an A-level teacher in an international school, and the father of a Year 13 student, I have - in the infamous words of Donald Rumsfeld - enough ”known unknowns”.

I don’t really know how the A-level grades of my students and my daughter have been created, I don’t know whether my daughter will get the grades for her preferred university, I don’t know how she’ll get from Africa to the UK when she does find out where she’s going.

I also don’t know if she’ll need to be quarantined when she gets there, and I don’t know how the university will deal with social distancing when the term starts.

But now it’s the ”unknown unknowns” that I’m more concerned about.

‘Lurching incompetence’ in awarding A-level results

The UK government’s decision - at the very last minute - to allow mock results to be used, instead of the made-up grades, indicates a kind of lurching incompetence that’s left me more or less breathless.

I know these are unprecedented times and, for that reason, I haven’t joined in with the wall-to-wall berating of the government’s every decision.

But now, I’ve lost confidence in the process.

There are, of course, always computer algorithms underpinning the spread of A-level results. But this is different. Now the computer is giving out the results.

Unless, that is, you don’t care for the computer’s decision and you want to go with a mock result.

Can we use old AS results?

Many international schools still run AS exams, as the old modular system remains in the International A levels.

Can my students use their AS result instead of the made-up grade they’ve been given? This, obviously, is more robust than an in-house mock result. But maybe there’s a time-limit on the mock result?

Perhaps it has to be towards the end of Year 13. This would make some sense, as Year 13 is often so different from Year 12.

But, here’s the thing - I’ve run many mocks in my time and I, unlike the elite government advisers, can see some issues with using mock results for the actual grade.

Very often, I have not covered the whole course by the time a mock is run, so I specify certain parts of the specification that will not be included. I may also exclude certain types of question which I know we have not yet dealt with properly.

Sometimes the logistics of the thing mean I’m not given enough time to run the whole paper.

Sometimes, to get over this, I have mocks running into lunchtime, with plenty of noise and distraction going on. Sometimes, I use whole past papers and risk the fact that some of the students may have found them online, along with the mark scheme.

Sometimes, there will be questions in the mock which I have already used in class some time before as practice questions.

Sometimes, I even give a student the benefit of the doubt when marking because I know they need encouragement.

Mocks exam are not ‘real’ exams

Maybe this is my incompetence, but - in fairness - I was using all of these strategies as part of a year-long programme of learning that was designed to build up to external exams at the end of the year.

Neither I, nor my students, had any idea that any of the mocks were tantamount to the actual exam.

This did change after the school went online and we knew there were no exams - then, every essay I set and every “mock” taken was seen very differently. But, by this time, everyone was working from home - hardly ideal exam conditions.

Surely not a situation from which to gather final grades?

Damaging the UK’s education prowess?

And what of my non-UK colleagues? What do they make of all this? I think it’s fair to say that they are not overly impressed with the process.

One business teacher I spoke with today described the shock of the exam boards apparently abandoning the principle of having the teacher’s input at the core of determining grades, and of seeing the whole process as something which is best determined in a sort of lab experiment - depersonalised and entirely data-driven.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing new in the UK education system’s faith in data.

It used to drive almost everything, from Ofsted judgements, to predicted grades, to school-based interventions.

But now, it’s finally driving absolutely everything, including the actual grades that students are given. or at least I think it is - unless you use the mock grade, or there’s been another announcement.

The author is a teacher in an international school in Africa