Facing snags with your teacher-assessed grades? Got a colleague who brags, blags or, quite understandably, flags? Frustrated by exam board lags, or government zigzags? Thinking of hitting the fags, or even packing your bags, as morale sags? 

Apologies for the, er, gags: they are the best I can muster as we scale the heights of the exam grading system, the crowning glory of a ghastly year.

School closure was miserable: it widened gaps, disrupted learning, stymied the extracurricular stuff that transforms education, and caused widespread mental and emotional anguish. Even if we learned to manage it and even to appreciate its time-efficiencies, no one could have wanted schools to stay closed for any longer than safety demanded.

And yet the return has, at times, felt worse: yes, a regathering of community, but also like emerging from the tornado shelter to behold a scene of utter devastation. 

The wind has dropped to a breeze, the sunlight sparkles, a seagull caws a sign of life, but the landscape is battered and wasted, and we are the clear-up team. It’s our calling to overcome despair and embody hope in practical action. The trouble is, we are as bruised and crushed as the scene we survey.

GCSEs and A levels 2021: Schools and teachers in the firing line

The national mood is lifting, albeit gingerly: the reopening hospitality sector has brought a million people out of furlough and something like normal social existence starts to beckon. All of this is unquestionably good (and the clouds of new variants unquestionably bad), even if a freshly tumescent prime minister is getting more of the credit for it than he deserves.

But that bounce is hard to find in schools. The toll has been huge on young lives, and so, too, on the adults who support them. 

Pastoral systems are buckling under the strain, leaders are burned out by the safeguarding caseload, especially as the moral horror of Everyone’s Invited joined the mix just as in-school testing ended. 

On to this tableau, enter TAGs, stage left. Or possibly stage left-field...and possibly CAGs.

The terminology is significant. “Teacher-assessed grades” certainly reflects the current reality in classrooms and department offices, and expresses the burden of professional conscience that individual teachers feel as they weigh assessment results against students’ achievement over 18 months, and against everything else they know about each one. 

The T in TAGs recognises the huge part played by teachers, but may also leave them feeling exposed: if I underestimate or overestimate, is it all on me?

The term “CAGs” is, meanwhile, so last year, but at least it recognises the role of the centre in quality assurance, and reflects the reality that kicks in next month when grades are checked and validated across the school (and even beyond). The C in CAGs offers professional solidarity against the wrath of appeals that is to come, which could, quite possibly, consume the whole of August with fire.

That solidarity comes, though, with a heavy workload. “Thank you for your hard work so far on the process of estimating grades for this summer’s public exams,” my deputy head recently wrote to subject leaders. “We have completed the first eight steps; just another 13 steps to go…” 

And this is for a process that, to be clear, is probably in the middle of the pack in terms of length, modelled on a widely recommended template that was itself based on Ofqual guidance. Other schools have even more tortuous paths, as they seek to navigate between the rock of compliance and the hard place of appeals. 

A better ruse could not have been devised to silence anyone who has ever wondered if exams are really the best way to assess students. We seem to be learning that, rather like democracy, exams are indeed the worst way to measure achievement…apart from all the other ways.

Or perhaps apart from a way like this, which combines all the anxiety and uncertainty of freedom without any of its benefits, and all the frustrations of a faceless, centralised system without any of the protections it might offer.

This way also contrives to preserve a substantial financial cost to schools even while it gives them a huge additional workload previously shouldered by examiners. Last week’s justification that exam fees pay for things like support and appeals doesn’t cut it: the support was inadequate, and the burden of appeals still looms.

Indeed, the only consolation, should the roadmap to post-pandemic normality be delayed, would be that there wouldn’t be holidays for senior leaders to miss out on as they handle those appeals - which, remember, are direct challenges to our professional judgements from students and families who know us personally.

Was it too much to expect a decision about January exams before, well, January? Was it unreasonable to expect sample questions in each subject banked against the possibility of leaked papers or force majeure? Was it overly demanding to want a timeline of decision-making agreed by last autumn and then stuck to, rather than still being improvised as spring turned to summer?

The fury and despair of curriculum leaders matches the burnout of their pastoral colleagues. For schools to be charged for such abject failure still smarts, but most worrying of all for the integrity of the process is the fact that so few schools have yet had their TAG policies either approved or rejected. 

Schools spotted as long ago as March 2020 that there would be a summer 2021 problem to address, given that this year’s GCSE cohort were going to suffer far greater disruption than last year’s. We tell students starting exam courses that they are a two-year marathon, not a one-term sprint: it’s a pity that Ofqual, government and exam boards haven’t learned the same lesson.

On the process drags, despite a policy in rags. No one likes nags, of course, but when the class of 2021 have their results in the bags, perhaps the nation will remember the teachers who laboured to generate them…and hang out some flags.

Patrick Moriarty is headteacher of the Jewish Community Secondary School, in the London Borough of Barnet