The chief exams regulator has told Tes that she can “see no reason” to delay the return to pre-pandemic grading standards following today’s release of GCSE results, which showed an expected fall in the proportion of top grades and a slight decrease in the overall pass rate for all entries.
Dr Jo Saxton, chief regulator at Ofqual, told Tes that she believes “teachers do not need another abstract year” and that she “wants to help teachers get back as soon as they possibly can to the standards that they know, that they’ve ingested, that they’re used to working with”.
However, the 2022 GCSE and A-level results are now being analysed and Ofqual will make a formal decision on grading for next year this autumn, Dr Saxton said.
While exams returned this summer after two years of cancellations owing to the pandemic, mitigations were put in place to help students who had had their learning disrupted by the Covid pandemic.
Exam boards were asked to release exam aid information in advance and Ofqual set grade boundaries at a midway point between 2019, when exams were last sat, and 2021, when grades were determined by teachers.
GCSE results 2022: Grades pitched at median level
In September last year, Ofqual revealed that grades this summer would be pitched at a median between 2021 and 2019 levels as part of a two-step plan to return to pre-pandemic grading levels.
As was expected, today’s GCSE results revealed a fall in the proportion of top grades and a slight decrease in the overall pass rate for all entries.
However, this year’s results for both A levels and GCSEs show they have been pitched much closer, in most cases, to the higher grades of 2021, sparking concern that next year’s cohort will see a larger fall despite also experiencing Covid disruption.
But today Dr Saxton said Ofqual had “always said” that getting back to “normality” was important “and this year’s results demonstrate we’ve taken a significant step back” towards it.
She also said she was a “grade inflation warrior” and did not “care about abstract concepts”.
‘No reason to add in another stage’
Instead, Dr Saxton said she cares “about what it is that most helps teachers meet the needs of the communities and the students that are in front of them day in, day out…That’s my motivation”.
“I see no reason to add in another stage,” she said. “I want to help teachers get back as soon as they possibly can to the standards that they know, that they’ve ingested, that they’re used to working with. But I committed that I would review this summer’s results and the impact of the mitigations. I need to do that work before I 1,000 per cent say what I said last September is what is happening.”
Dr Saxton also explained: “I said all along that we would need to do an analysis of those results. We’ve got teams of people beginning to do that now and when we have undertaken that we will confirm our decision on grading, and that will be in the autumn.”
But today Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that it would be asking its members what they believed would be fair now it is clear that next year’s cohort will have been heavily impacted by Covid.
He said the union was “in favour of a return to the 2019 standard because we will otherwise bake in higher grades resulting from an extraordinary situation and potentially damage the value of those grades”.
“However, we will be asking the question about whether this should proceed as planned next year or whether there should be a further year’s grace because of the impact of Covid. We will also be consulting over adaptations to the exams themselves to see what measures worked well and what schools and colleges would like to see retained, and whether there are any further adjustments that would be beneficial in ensuring that students are able to be assessed as fairly as possible in light of the pandemic,” Mr Barton said.
“The government and Ofqual will now need to decide whether to put mitigations in place for next year. The strong indication we are hearing from school and college leaders is that this must happen because next year’s cohort will have also been heavily impacted by Covid.”
Mr Barton said this was “particularly important” because of the likelihood of more waves of Covid infections during the autumn and winter.
ASCL had previously warned that its members were worried that setting grade boundaries higher in 2022 risked creating “baked-in inflation”.
Regional gaps in GCSE and A-level grades
This year’s GCSE and A-level results data has 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.
FFT Education Datalab warned earlier this week that different Covid absence levels in schools across the country would “translate into differences in grades” this year.
Asked about what should be done to tackle the issue, Dr Saxton said that “everyone who works in education wants to see those gaps close, and obviously there are multiple organisations working on exactly that”.
