“After last year’s exams row, heads called for an inquiry so that we could learn lessons. But that just didn’t happen, lessons were not learnt and now we are here again.”

Pepe Dilasio is among the school leaders and teachers facing up to another set of GCSE and A level results produced without exams because of the Covid pandemic.

The Sheffield headteacher warned that this time schools could find themselves in the firing line despite having gone through “the busiest half term I can ever remember in education” in order to ensure students received their grades.

Grades: What to expect on GCSEs and A level 2021 results day

Exclusive: Fears over gap between state and private school on A level results day

GCSE results day 2021: How teacher assessed grades got the greenlight

This week’s teacher assessed grades will inevitably be the source of controversy, with questions for teachers, schools, exam boards, Ofqual and the Department for Education about how we arrived at the results.

But they also mark the end of one of the most stressful periods teachers and schools in this country have ever faced at the height of the Covid crisis.

So just how did we get to this point, where teachers have been relied upon so heavily for GCSE and A level results in 2021?

2021: A new year but more exam U-turn chaos

Just six months after a major U-turn - which dropped the controversial use of an algorithm to moderate GCSE and A level grades last summer - the government found itself in the unenviable position of cancelling exams for the second year in a row.

Despite previous strong assurances that exams were going ahead - perhaps with modifications such as advance notice of topics - on 4 January prime minister Boris Johnson cancelled both GCSEs and A levels.

In a statement which announced that schools were closing to most pupils in a new national lockdown, Mr Johnson said: “We recognise that this means it’s not possible or fair for all exams to go ahead this summer as normal.”

The news stunned the sector.

As one leader told Tes: ”‘Exams off?!’ [was] a WhatsApp message shared among my senior team at 8.05pm on Monday  4 January.

“After only one day back at school after the Christmas holidays, we were all processing the news that the summer examination series was cancelled.”

Helena Marsh, principal of Linton Village College in South Cambridgeshire added: “We’d previously planned for only a week of online teaching for our Year 11s and we had just learnt, along with the rest of the country listening to the Downing Street announcement, that we’d be facing many weeks of remote learning and uncertainty about what would replace GCSEs and A Levels in the summer.  

“As an 11-16 secondary school, the initial challenge was to reassure shocked Year 11 students and their parents. From the outset, we didn’t really have much to communicate.”

Ofqual and the DfE then  launched a two-week consultation,  closing January 29.

And tellingly, Ofqual’s interim chief regulator Simon Lebus told Tes at the time that teacher workload in the process was one of the concerns highlighted by respondents.

February - teacher assessed grades (TAGS) get the green light

Almost two months after the Johnson announcement, at the end of February, plans for A level and GCSE grades to be awarded through teacher assessment were given the go ahead.

Schools were told students could be assessed through a range of evidence including (optional) external tasks set by exam boards, with A level students receiving grades on August 10 and GCSE candidates getting their results August 12.

Ms Marsh added: “While planning for a safe reopening of schools in March and all of the operational demands of running an on-site Covid-19 testing centre, we were also tasked with the challenge of redesigning an entire programme of assessment at the eleventh hour.

“School leaders considered what additional assessments would be required and what existing assessment data could be used towards the TAG evidence base.

“We were still awaiting finalised guidance which took almost 12 weeks to be published, finally allowing schools to put firm plans in place.

“Examinations had been cancelled because of the disruption caused by Covid-19 to students’ education. It didn’t seem fair or reasonable to expect our Year 11s to sit the equivalent of a full, in-house version of an exam series, weeks earlier.

“In essence, this is what ended up happening in most schools, with the only difference being that assessments were marked by teachers instead of paid examiners.”

March - schools still waiting for grades guidance

At a meeting of the Commons’ education select committee on 9 March, schools minister Nick Gibb assured MPs that teacher-assessed grades would be based on standards from previous years, and that a “huge amount of scaffolding” including exam board training was available for teachers to ensure consistency in 2021.

But by 22 March - more than two months after the Prime Minister’s announcement - headteachers warned they had been left “up against the wire” as they waited for guidance from exam boards about exactly how to assess GCSE and A-level students this year.

The guidance on how teachers should award grades this year was expected by the end of this month. But heads were left fearing it might come when some schools had already broken up for the Easter holidays.

Amid this uncertainty, fears in the sector were growing.

One school leader writing in Tes warned that the lack of clarity and moderation from boards over TAGs could mean that teachers would be “in the crosshairs” if anything were to go wrong with the results.

Unlike 2020‘s moderating algorithm, in 2021 there would be no exam board or Ofqual moderation in the usual sense.

At heads’ conferences, Ofqual representatives gave slightly different views of the picture, too.

Ofqual interim chair Ian Bauckham told the ASCL conference that the grade inflation likely to be seen in 2021 would not be sustainable over the long term and will erode confidence in qualifications, and that this would need to be controlled in the future.

But interim chief regulator Simon Lebus, speaking at the NAHT conference, acknowledged that teachers would give pupils the benefit of the doubt in a way an exam can’t.

“But that will only lead to some small upward pressure on outcomes, not the Weimar-style inflation or ‘prizes for all’ that some commentators have unhelpfully suggested,” he added.

Both made clear that parents must not be allowed sway over grading decisions.

March 26 - Guidance finally arrives 

Then, finally, on Friday March 26, with just a week to go before many were due to break up for the Easter holidays, exam boards released the long-awaited guidance for schools on how teachers should award GCSE and A-level grades this year. 

Headteachers welcomed the publication but were left concerned that schools were now only left with 12 weeks before they had to submit grades to exam boards (on June 18).

The end of the month also saw teachers taking to social media to mock “hilarious” grade descriptors provided by the Joint Council for Qualifications, with the guidance for awarding the top GCSE grade 9 summarised by one teacher as being “better than an 8”.

April - schools decide how to assess pupils and produce grades

The cruellest month yet ushered in more challenges for schools and colleges, as school leaders coped with a number of weighty decisions that would usually be dealt with by exam boards.

Schools had to decide: the number of new assessments to enter into each pupil’s portfolio, the agreed amount of preparation in terms of lesson time all pupils should have before they sit these assessments, how to weight assessments based on when they were completed and the security of conditions and when to hold assessment weeks to meet the deadline for submitting grades to exam boards on June 18.

And, if this were not enough, they also had to moderate the portfolios and submit them to internal checks, reviewed against historical data from the school.

Mr Dilasio, the principal of Wales High School in Sheffield and ASCL vice president described this period as the busiest he has ever known.

“My overriding memory of this period will be just it becoming apparent the barrel load of work that was going to be involved producing assessments and tasks, marking the work, recording and presenting evidence.

“We stripped back everything else at the school and for eight weeks we did nothing else to provide the space and time to produce TAGs and even then we only got through by the skin of our teeth.”

Mr Dilasio warned that this inevitably meant that other year groups were disadvantaged because schools simply did not have the capacity to operate as normal with “the huge amount of work that has been dumped on them in a very short space of time.”

Another school leader, who asked to remain anonymous, described how schools had to establish their own structure for producing grades in an attempt to ensure too much pressure did not fall onto the shoulders of individual teachers.

He said: “We decided to get everything done before the May half term because we didn’t think it would be right for teachers to be in a position where they were having to mark work over that time but that has meant that a lot of work had to be compressed into a tight period.”

In this academy three mini assessments and then a final assessment were carried out in each subject which then needed to be marked, checked and submitted.

He said: “We developed a structure for the assessments and we hope that this has meant that teachers can use this and it has meant that awarding grades has been about following the structure rather than teachers feeling responsibility for grades being about their personal judgement… however it is inevitable that some of the feeling of personal accountability for grades does get down to teachers”

During April schools also learned that they would have “no discretion” over whether or not to submit appeals to exam boards.

And, controversially, Ofqual announced that it will collect samples of student work from every school.

Heads criticised the plans as “scandalous” - particularly because they would only have 48 hours to turn over the evidence - and Mr Lebus said the watchdog was “conscious” of teacher workload.

May: Legal grade battles loom

By May, some parents have begun contacting lawyers over their concerns about the fairness of the grading process.

Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said there is now a “massive pressure” on teachers to secure evidence for their pupils’ grades.

At the same time, Ofqual chair Ian Bauckham told Tes that schools should not be using the remaining time they have before June 18 to do “tests and tests and more tests”.

And Ofqual published research detailing how, for teachers in 2020, the pressure to limit generosity when grading pupils was “strongly felt”.

Mr Dilasio recalled that the impact of the process is starting to be seen across the school in other year groups.

“We carried out assessments on our year 10 and were quite concerned by what have found and as a result we have made plans for year 10s to be included in our summer school catch up provision which had not originally been our intention.”

But the most consistent message from schools has been how challenging it has been to face the sheer volume of work involved producing TAGs amid such uncertainty.

Headteacher Caroline Barlow of Heathfeld Community College in East Sussex, said: “The hardest aspect was the additional workload for staff, in the context of a lack of consistent national approaches they were designing a process with no precedent and no coherent structure yet with a strongly held moral imperative to do the very best for students in fair and rigorous ways often at the cost of their own workload management.

“We tried to remove all other workload demands at this time but the sheer scale of the preparation, implementation and marking was unprecedented.”

June: TAG deadline approaches

As the 18 June deadline approached for schools to submit their grades, an exclusive Tes survey revealed that most teachers lost at least a week of their own time to the grading process.

The survey of over 2,800 grading teachers also found that one in four had experienced parents putting pressure on them to raise students’ grades, or to change the evidence going towards their teacher-assessed GCSE and A-level grades.

And 9 in 10 reported problems with the grading process, with one teacher vividly describing the ordeal as like “climbing Mount Everest with a route drawn on a napkin”.

The survey also revealed the sheer multiplicity of approaches to grading taken by schools, with a pic n’ mix of mock exams, coursework and classroom-based assessments taken to secure evidence for the grades.

At the Festival of Education, Gavin Williamson said he was aware of “speculation” that grades this year won’t reflect pupils’ abilities, and countered this by saying: “I back teachers. They know their students’ capabilities and the quality of work they’re able to produce.”

And JCQ issued guidance telling schools to share the evidence they have used to arrive at grades with pupils themselves - to cut down on appeals.

July: Fears that a lack of evidence could mean some pupils miss out

Last month Tes reported on heartbreaking stories of pupils who may miss out on grades through a lack of evidence. Most teachers taking part in a poll said at least some of their students lack sufficient evidence for a grade.

Addressing the Commons, schools minister Nick Gibb announced that exam boards will still make final checks on conduct on teacher-assessed grades before GCSE and A-level results are published in three weeks’ time.

He told MPs that “more than 99.9 per cent of all teacher-assessed grades have been submitted for this year”.

Last month also saw Ofqual launch a survey asking teachers to rate the TAG grading process in three words, which provoked some responses on social media which cannot be published.

And as teachers reached the end of a year like no other a Mumsnet poll finds that over half of parents see the TAG grading process as unfair while ASCL hinted that schools could face a huge onslaught of appeals once results go out.

August:  A warning that ‘hero teachers must not be blamed’

With results just days away there is mounting concern that results which are well above the spread of grades seen before the pandemic will see teachers accused of grade inflation.

Tes has also been told by sources close to the government that there are concerns about a widening gap in teacher assessed grades in state and private schools’ grades at A level.

At end of last week Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union sounded a warning that if ministers, Ofqual or anyone else who seeks to pin blame on teachers for the fall out from results day that they will be met with “fire and fury.”

School leaders Tes have spoken to also questioned the idea of grade inflation and criticised the demands placed upon them. 

‘Students getting the grades they deserve’

A leader who asked to remain anonymous said: “There will be a lot of nonsense said about grade inflation next week but I think these will be students getting the grades that they deserve.

“Students are not going to have an off day when we are looking at a holistic picture… The student who is performing as an A grade level throughout the course but then gets a C on the day is not going to happen.    Rather than seeing this year and last year’s results as being grade inflation it might be that 2019’s results had some grade deflation built into them.”

He also told Tes he believes teacher assessment could have a role in the future if it is properly managed.

“Because of the flexibility that has been allowed you could have a situation where students have the same grade having completed totally different tasks and assessments to achieve or equally pupils’ producing similar work in different schools and getting different grades.

“However I do feel like that there is a system that will work out there in all this but it needs time for schools to be able to collect and produce evidence calmly  rather than having the whole process compressed into such a small space of time.

“There is a cynical view that people who want to keep exams as they are, are happy to have seen this process happen the way it has because by the end of it everyone is thinking:  ‘I just want to get back to exams’ but I do think teacher assessment could be made to work.”

As we head into this week results day will be a different experience for teachers and schools even compared with last year.

Ms Marsh added: “I’m looking forward to seeing students receive the product of their efforts next week. Our Year 11 cohort has been incredibly mature and resilient; they have really impressed with how they have applied themselves.

However, GCSE results day doesn’t have the same sense of expectation knowing that students will be receiving the grades that we have submitted for them.

“The unknowns of the appeals process does create another potential stress point for schools, which is different from the standard grade review and remark requests.

The piles of TAG evidence stacked in my office, just in case, is a physical reminder of the great deal of additional work produced by teachers and students that teachers this year.

I’m incredibly proud of how teachers have managed this gargantuan task and worked so hard to benefit for our students.”