Today’s inevitable announcement that centre-assessed grades (CAGs) have, cuckoo-like, usurped mock and awarded grades, kicking those fledglings out of the Ofqual nest, possibly marks the end of the beginning of this sorry tale of confusion and woe. But it is probably not the beginning of its end. 

We can only hope that, as new injustices reveal themselves (any time from around 4.01pm, I’m guessing), we still have the energy, and language, to think afresh about this fiasco.

The maths seems to have failed us; the danger is that language will not be able to explain how we got here, and where we go next. 

When Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”, he probably hadn’t considered Ofqual algorithms. Clearly limited in foresight, he also seems to have not thought ahead to how a major industrial nation could have ended up with Gavin Williamson responsible for schools and universities (it’s a little like having Elmer Fudd in charge of the Ministry of Defence). 

But if Wittgenstien had known what dystopia awaited students in the future, he might have rewritten whole sections of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, preferring emojis to words or, possibly (because he liked succinctness), he would have just used one to sum up the whole immersive experience we’re living through right now:

A-level and GCSE results: The limits of our language

Because it seems that we have reached the limits of our language when it comes to A-level and GCSE grades (and let’s not forget the IB results, that exotic, pungent aftertaste that refuses to go away for discerning schools). 

Intensifiers, superlatives, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, phrases, metaphors, allusions, imagery...have we not now exhausted the full range of capturing our unending imbroglio? Are we unable to create more vivid imagery to describe its Shakespearean scale? Can I stretch this series of rhetorical questions to a third just to satisfy my desire for a perfect tricolon? Obviously not.

For many teachers, the implications of awarding CAGs instead of calculated grades for GCSE results outweigh those for A levels. The sheer number of students and subjects involved, the range and combination of possible outcomes and inconsistencies waiting to reveal themselves, the level of enquiries coming in to understaffed, overstretched and exhausted examination offices, all threatened to overwhelm teachers right at the beginning of the new term. 

And all the time, lurking in the wings, the sense that this could change, with new, revised endings submitted from Whitehall to trash the last, final script that we all had to stumble and mumble through. 

Misplaced optimism

A-level results blew the roof off schools, but the explosion went out as well as in, off into universities and further afield. With that shared sense of direction came more options, greater diversity of thought and solutions.

The bomb that has just been detonated by today’s announcement will be kept mostly indoors, the damage contained, for now, but changing irrevocably many sixth forms for two years, as our Year 11s graduate upwards. 

The announcement at four o’clock today promoted the idea that CAGs are the panacea that will make this agony disappear: a silver bullet to finally kill off this detested zombie examination season. 

It could be misplaced optimism: one set of complications could be replaced by others, and you don’t have to think too hard about what they might be: what happens if the CAGs are lower than Ofqual’s standardised grades? Do those A-level students have their university places withdrawn? 

What will be the response from government if independent schools, and schools with small cohorts, appear to benefit from vastly improved results? How can you eliminate the huge differences in how schools arrived at their CAGs?

From one burning room to another

Will schools be able to turn students down from studying certain subjects in the sixth form because of the low CAGs they calculated? When will we start seeing demands for predicted grades to be used if they are higher than the CAGs?

Questions beget questions, but stubbornly refuse to give the answers that schools and universities need right now. 

Trust is a fragile thing, and schools live on it like oxygen. But now that the teachers’ CAGs are to be released, their value rising significantly, and trust could be in shorter supply when all we were dealing with were grades arrived at by distant, anonymous, authors. 

Now, they’ve moved closer, and schools will have to own what they never wanted to create in the first place. We move from one burning room to another. We’ve run out of places to hide in. 

The algorithms haven’t worked, the words no longer help explain what we’re doing and why. There are no more options left. 

David James is deputy head (academic) at a leading UK independent school. He tweets as @drdavidajames