It’s going to be a busy summer term for staff and students in colleges. Exams have been cancelled for the second year running and, once the spring break is over, there will be 10 weeks left before grades need to be submitted. Everyone wants this year’s grading system to go well and college staff will be working hard to ensure that students get the grades they deserve this year.

We’ve come a long way from “exams are the best and fairest way for young people to show what they know and can do” (education secretary Gavin Williamson, November 2020) to “schools and colleges are best placed to judge the performance of their students” (Ofqual, February 2021) - and that shift towards more trust in teachers is a welcome direction of travel.

In full: GCSE and A-level 2021 Ofqual and DfE proposals

Ofqual assessment plans: What FE staff need to know

Exams 2021: Key questions that need to be answered

Last year, the question was what grade might a student have achieved had the pandemic not occurred. This year, students’ grades should reflect the standard at which they are performing based on evidence of their demonstrated knowledge, understanding and skills.

2021 will be different to 2020. There’s been a rapid round of consultations on both the policy and the process, and we now know the key elements of the system. Teacher-assessed grades will need to be submitted by colleges, and students should only be assessed on the content they have covered while also ensuring sufficient breadth of coverage. Following external quality checks, the results will be issued by the exam boards, who remain accountable for the results.

This means that colleges and schools have been handed the lion’s share of grading work this year. A lot is also being expected of awarding organisations. Under Ofqual’s watchful eye, they have been tasked with producing a workable common system and transforming themselves rapidly from examining, marking and grading organisations into quality assurance and validation bodies for thousands of centres.

GCSEs and A levels 2021: The need for ‘watertight’ guidance

For this year’s process to be well understood, clear and consistent communication will be essential and the language needs to be right. For instance, the term “teacher-assessed grade” doesn’t help - it implies that a single teacher is responsible for each grade, rather than a team effort that includes moderation to ensure common standards across the centre. We also need to stop talking about grade inflation or “generous” and “harsh” grading and focus instead on the common standards that grades are pegged at. If the grade profile is higher this year than in 2019, nationally or at centre level, this isn’t necessarily more “generous”, it may just be the result of using a different assessment process to apply the same standard.

So now the policy framework is set, what we need is clear, common, watertight guidance - and as soon as possible. This should include:

• All the key dates and timelines in one place.
• Help for centres to produce a simple centre policy that can serve for all exam boards. This should provide the context for the use of professional judgement and offer protection for centres if those grades are challenged.
• Advice on the use of the published assessment materials. Although these are not compulsory, they can be a useful part of the assessment package that will provide evidence to support grades.
• Grade descriptors and exemplars to support grading. This will be particularly important around key grade boundaries such as GCSE grade 3/4.
• Clarity about staff feeding back to students about their performance, telling them which assessments will be drawn on for grading and not telling them what grade is being submitted for them.
• How the rules for reasonable adjustments, access arrangements and special consideration will apply, given there are no exams.
• Guidance on internal quality assurance. Colleges are very familiar with double marking, cross marking, sampling, moderation and verification, but the use of these will need to be set out in the guidance.
• How exam boards will approach external quality assurance. However good the grading advice is, different centres will inevitably apply it slightly differently. They need to know what “flags” might trigger a virtual centre visit and what evidence needs to be available. There are seven weeks between grade submission and results days, and, in that time, exam boards need to sample evidence, engage in any dialogue with centres whose results might need to be revisited and resolve the issues. Centres working hard to apply the grading standards correctly will want reassurance that no one is slipping under the radar of scrutiny.

Tackling inequality

One likely outcome of the pandemic is a further deepening of inequalities where disruption has had a differential impact and there is no explicit process to avoid this other than the requirement that students should only be assessed on what they’ve been taught. This makes it vital that a full equality impact assessment, including all protected characteristics, social class and provider type and size should be published with the results in August.

Other challenges for colleges include the differential approach to functional skills, which leaves many students feeling aggrieved that English and maths exams have been cancelled at GCSE but not for functional skills. Also, the fact that level 2 and level 3 results days are so early and so close together will cause serious problems for colleges trying to support existing students and new students all at once, and this will make it hard to arrange staff leave in August.

If it’s a challenge to harmonise processes across the A level and GCSE exam boards, it’s even more difficult to ensure consistency across all categories of vocational and technical qualifications, particularly for those that are least like GCSE and A level. The VTQ landscape is very diverse, there are many more awarding organisations and no single solution fits all. For many VTQs, assessment happens throughout the year and adaptations have already been made to mitigate for disruption, but it’s clear that students on practical courses have been particularly disadvantaged by the loss of time developing their skills on campus or in the workplace.

Colleges and their resourceful staff will do everything they can to ensure that grading works this year. Looking forward, there is a strong feeling that next year we won’t want to simply snap back to things as they were. After two years of trusting teachers more, it must surely be time to start building a more flexible exam and grading system in which teachers play a bigger role.

Eddie Playfair is a senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges