It’s “impossible” to mitigate for the varied regional impact of the Covid pandemic, the chief exams regulator has told Tes after the Department for Education and Ofqual today set out their plans for how GCSE and A-level exams will run next summer.

Commenting on the measures that the regulator and the DfE are taking to ensure that the assessment system is fair for students sitting exams in 2023 who have experienced disruption to their study programmes during the pandemic, Dr Jo Saxton, the chief regulator of Ofqual, said her organisation was “not trying to mitigate individual disruption because the exam system can’t do that”.

Ofqual announced earlier today that it was planning a return to pre-pandemic grading in 2023, as expected, but with “some protection against any impact of Covid disruption”.

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Exams returned in 2022, after two years of cancellations, with mitigations in place to help students who had their learning disrupted by the pandemic, including advance information on topics and exam aids, such as formulae and equation sheets.

Today the government said that students will continue to be provided with support in GCSE mathematics, physics and combined science with formulae and equation sheets, but not with advance information of exam content.

GCSE and A-level exams 2023: Ofqual boss defends plans

While the decisions around the curriculum were made by the DfE, Dr Saxton said she thought they were “the right ones”.

“What’s really clear to me is students love the idea of advance information, but talking to students up and down the country last year, once they had it in their hands they found it quite difficult to get used to and it was just another set of documents to get your head around,” she said.

On the flip side, Dr Saxton said that students found exam aids “took a weight off their shoulders”. 

In terms of grading, Dr Saxton said universities had been “really clear” that returning to pre-pandemic standards “would help them feel more confident in their offer-making”. 

Dr Saxton added: “I don’t imagine exam aids being a part of the future.”

She said it would be “unlikely” for exam aids to be used beyond next summer. 

The measures announced today have been broadly welcomed by sector leaders, but fears about the unequal impact of the pandemic on learning remain.

Sarah Hannafin, senior policy adviser for school leaders’ union the NAHT, said that those taking exams next summer “have experienced disruption to their learning over the past three years” and it was “right” that this was “recognised and steps taken to ensure the cohort is not disadvantaged as a result of their experiences”.

She said the approach to grading next summer should “create fairness” but added that “concerns will remain” for those “who have faced more disruption than others”.

Ms Hannafin said that while it was “unsurprising” that advance information would not be used this year, “we have to hope that there is no resurgence of the disruption to attendance, teaching and learning over the winter which could create challenges in the face of those decisions”.

This year’s GCSE and A-level results data revealed that the attainment gap between regions in the North and South of England in terms of the proportion of entries achieving top grades has widened since exams were last held before the Covid pandemic.

Tes asked Dr Saxton how Ofqual would ensure that the arrangements for exams next year will target those most affected by the pandemic.

She said: “It is impossible to find a way of working out whether one student has had significantly more disruption than another.

“If it had been possible to deliver that, that would have been done in 2021.

“What we can do is make it as fair as possible by treating everybody equally.”

However, reacting to the announcement on the plans for next year, Natalie Perera, chief executive of think tank the Education Policy Institute, said it remained “concerned about the impact on disadvantaged students” as its research found that “disadvantaged students and students in the North of the country have experienced greater learning loss as a result of the pandemic”.

Could grades be higher in 2023?

Asked if exam grades could be higher than 2019 levels next summer, Dr Saxton said Ofqual had “tried quite hard not to talk about a specific year” because she did not want people to “obsess about specific data points”.

She added that there is movement every year in grading and she wanted “teachers and leaders to focus on the substantive material about what they know” and what students need to know.

Returning to the 2019 point, Dr Saxton said that it could be “possible” for results to be higher than the last pre-pandemic year, but that the “point of this approach is to protect students from their results being lower because of the disruption that they’ve suffered throughout the pandemic”. 

Tes asked if there could be any additional arrangements made if Covid caused more disruption in schools this winter. 

Dr Saxton said: “If we’ve learned anything about Covid, it’s that it’s unpredictable.”

“All of us at Ofqual” and colleagues in the DfE were “very mindful of being aware of what the pandemic can do”, she added.