“It wasn’t too bad, Miss!”
That’s the kind of feedback we want from our A-level students after a terminal exam. It’s a sign they’ve fulfilled their potential, the breadth and depth of which we know intimately by now. Mercifully, it’s also what we hear most of the time, or words to that effect, because we have prepared our students thoroughly and exams are not designed to catch candidates out.
But things can go wrong. I remember Sophie’s self-reproach in a previous year. “I completely screwed up the Middlemarch question,” she sobbed. “I spent more time retelling the story than I did answering the bloody question!”
And she was right: I had predicted an A for Sophie, but she was awarded a B. Not the end of the world, but not a true reflection of her ability either.
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We do know our students very well as A-level teachers. The teacher-student ratio is lower here than at GCSE; there’s normally more lesson time, as well as more discussion and one-to-one coaching between lessons for those who want it.
A-level results open doors
Many seek out that extra input because the stakes are so high. A-level results open doors; they transform life chances when we are talking about the child from the impoverished estate who gets into the prestigious university. There can be no greater reward in teaching than to have played a part in such individual triumphs.
But last Thursday, we discovered that transformative outcomes of this magnitude were the very ones that were taken away. The fact that the young people who achieved the most, by overcoming the odds stacked against them, should be cut down to statistically regular size by an unthinking, unknowing standardisation process is monstrously unfair. They have been punished for being remarkable.Meanwhile, the same exercise ensured that privately educated candidates were, by and large, ushered through to the next gold-plated step. Lewis Goodall, policy editor for Newsnight, spent Friday with university admissions, currently in chaos. He tweeted: “Some of their places are being taken up which would normally be free: by those from private schools who would normally fail to get the grades. Less of that has happened this year as they’ve been more likely to keep their CAGs.”
According to data from Ofqual, the proportion of A-level grades at grade A and above has risen at private schools this year by more than double the rate at any type of state school.
Even privately educated candidates can have a bad day. But in 2020, precious few of them did, and Ofqual apparently did not consider this. If ever there was a manifestation of the social mobility issue that blights this country, where destiny is so often dictated by birth, you can find it in the overlooking of such a glaring inequality.
There is a way to right all of this intolerable injustice - but it’s not through the “triple lock”. Mock exam results? Ministers,, please listen to the arguments against. Take note of the rarest of all things that now exists within our sometimes bitterly divided educational community: universal condemnation of a patently unfair and unworkable idea. As for autumn exams, the young people we are concerned about here don’t have access to private tutors - they have had no teaching for a full six months.
Are CAGs the fairest option?
The Scottish solution is the fairest available. Teachers have submitted their carefully considered centre-assessed grades (CAGs) already, and these must now be used to correct every egregious wrong. Of course, there will always be concern about the shape of the grade distribution curve for those who care more about statistical regularity year on year than they do about justice for individuals - but the individual grades should be trusted. Employers and universities should have confidence in them - because they stand on something real; the sure ground of professional judgement, albeit repeatedly talked down by politicians, punters and even from within the profession itself.
There is nothing capricious about the CAGs, unlike the terminal exam. And that is why CAG grades are higher this year than actual results in previous years, not because of the unprofessional “inflation” of grades. Former government adviser Sam Freedman understands this, tweeting:
“Imagine I’m a maths teacher in a normal year and I have five pupils who I know are capable of getting an A. They sit the exam and only 3 get an A, for whatever reason - eg, a tough question they weren’t prepared for, etc. Now this year I have to give an assessed grade for those 5. What do I do - well, I know they are all capable of an A so I put them down as an A. That happens across the system so overall now there are far more students predicted an A than in a normal exam year.”
In essence, nobody did a Sophie this year, until Ofqual stepped in, that is. Candidates achieved what they were capable of achieving. No one experienced a limbic hijack or imploded through exam-based anxiety, suffered a bereavement or watched their mother beaten up the night before the last exam. There was no hay fever, no missing of Section B. All students in our imaginary exam hall were able to fulfil their non-imaginary, their very real potential.
Ofqual, you must now return to them what you have taken away. The young people of 2020 deserve their CAGs; what they do not deserve, on top of prospects already ravaged by Covid-19, is this most callous injustice.
Mary Meredith is service manager for inclusion at Lincolnshire County Council and a former senior leader. A version of this article originally appeared on her blog
