No “right thinking person” would be unconcerned by the wider regional gap in top grades revealed in today’s A-level results, Ofqual chair Ian Bauckham has warned.
Commenting on data unveiled by the regulator today, which revealed a wider gap in top grades between the North East and South East compared with before the pandemic, Mr Bauckham said the exams regulator would need to “take stock” of results, and that policymakers would “need to respond in a way that’s appropriate”.
He added that it was “clearly not in our interests as a country” to have the kind of disparity seen in the results.
More on A-level results 2022:
The gap between the North East, which received the lowest proportion of A* and A grades out of all the regions (30.8 per cent), and the South East, which received the highest proportion (39.5 per cent), was 8.7 percentage points this year.
This is larger than the attainment gap between the highest and lowest performing regions in 2019 -the year A-level exams were last held - when it was 5.3 percentage points.
Asked about the disparity on BBC Radio 4‘s PM programme this evening, Mr Bauckham said: “One of the purposes of exams is to tell us the truth about differences in performance around the country.
“So what we will need to do next is take stock of these results, look at those important differences, and policymakers who are responsible for making decisions about education will need to respond in a way that’s appropriate, because it’s clearly not in our interests as a country to have that kind of disparity”.
Asked whether he was concerned about the gap, Bauckham responded: “Well, I’m not sure that any right-thinking person could not be concerned about a disparity in performance, but the key thing is, we now have evidence on the basis of the exams that have been taken that reflects evidence that we had before the pandemic.
“What policymakers now need to do is look at that and decide what can be done about it.”
Commenting earlier today on the widening gap, Chris Zarraga, director of the Schools North East network, said that the results in the area reflected “the disproportionate effect the pandemic has had” on it.
He said schools urgently needed a properly “thought-through and resourced ‘recovery’ plan” that recognises the regional contexts schools operate in.
Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson - who is from the region herself - said that students in the North East were “no less capable”, but were seeing their results go backwards compared with those of their peers across the South of England.
