Ofqual’s chief interim regulator Simon Lebus and interim chair Ian Bauckham spoke today at headteachers’ union conferences on the latest plans for the grading of GCSE and A-level exams this summer.
While Mr Lebus and Mr Bauckham appeared to be speaking from exactly the same script when it came to teacher-assigned grades - both giving a near identical example of how teachers would need to give pupils who had shown they were capable of a grade 9 the benefit of the doubt - they managed to come to very different-sounding conclusions about how this would impact inflation.
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Ian Bauckham told the Association of School and College Leaders that teachers using their professional judgement to award grades this year would still be likely to award grades above those achieved if exams had gone ahead.
“If repeated year on year, it would, of course, cumulatively erode the value of the qualification, so it will need to be controlled,” Mr Bauckham said.
He said that if inflation were repeated year on year, it would be unsustainable.
His comments were in contrast with Simon Lebus’ to the NAHT school leaders’ conference. Mr Lebus said teacher-assessed grades would not mean an “all shall have prizes” approach.
He said teacher assessment this year “will inevitably have an impact when repeated across the system. 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.”
Mr Bauckham also told ASCL that teachers’ decisions about what exam grades to award students should not be negotiated with pupils or their parents.
“Let me be crystal clear about the following point. That principle [of allowing pupils to know what evidence was being used], which we believe is right and appropriate in this year’s approach to grading, does not mean that either the selection of evidence or the decision about the grade which the evidence supports are somehow topics for negotiation between teacher and student, or teacher and parents,” he said.
“They are not. These are matters of teachers’ professional judgement.”
And Mr Lebus told NAHT that there should not be parental pressure on teachers, as their role in awarding grades should “not [be] made more difficult by having to deal with unacceptable pressures”.
He said this was why exam boards were providing teachers with detailed guidance on how to assign grades, and that instances of parents who tried to influence teachers’ judgements would be part of the reporting process.
“I have also heard concerns expressed about undue parental and student pressure placed on teachers to try to influence their judgement, and we will be providing - as part of the rules we set and those put in place by the board - for reporting all such activity,” he told an NAHT school leaders union summit.
Mr Lebus added that he understood the difficulties teachers faced when assigning grades to students.
“Much of the debate is, of course, predicated on assumptions of the difficulty of applying teacher judgement and some of the heavy responsibility the task places on teachers, who find they are not merely preparing their students for the next step of their life journey but allocating the exam grades that provide a passport to it,” he said.
“We know teachers feel the weight of this responsibility and are not always comfortable with some of the moral dilemmas and conflicts with which it confronts them.”
Teachers shouldn’t worry about not having all evidence for students to hand
Mr Bauckham has sought to assure teachers that they do not need to be anxious if they don’t have all the evidence of pupils’ past work they think they might need.
He said exam boards would be publishing guidance very shortly to support the process of producing grades and that he knew there was “enormous appetite” to have that as quickly as possible.
He added: “There is no need for any teacher to be anxious about not having kept this or that piece of evidence...No one had asked you to keep anything specific and there will be no question of you or your students being disadvantaged if you have not therefore done so up to now.”
He said the exam board guidance would tell teachers what kind of evidence could be used and ample time to produce this between April and June.
There was no point making external tasks confidential
Both Mr Lebus and Mr Bauckham said there was little benefit in not sharing external tasks set by exam boards - used as an optional basis for teacher judgements - with pupils after the Easter holidays, as they would have been leaked after teachers started using them anyway.
“The materials they will be provided with will primarily be generated from past papers, with quite a wide range of materials, so I think the materials will be available in sufficient profusion that you’re not suddenly going to come across something where you think, ‘Oh yes, I’ve done this one already’,” Mr Lebus said, adding that there would be supporting material around the tasks.
“I hope it’s not going to be an issue where you find yourself confronted with materials that you’ve already used so extensively they have no great additional benefit,” he said.
When asked at the ASCL conference about the decision to release this material publicly -described yesterday as a “car crash” - Mr Bauckham said this was being done to ensure no students were disadvantaged.
He told headteachers that these materials would be used in different ways by schools over a period of time.
He added: “If you try to make a set of questions and tasks super-confidential and release it only to schools to be kept strictly confidential until a particular day - it is actually a window of three, four, five weeks during which teachers will be doing this work -you are inevitably going to get that material being leaked anyway, which would simply create a situation where those who took them in more secure conditions at the beginning of the window are disadvantaged compared with those who did them at the end of the window.”
