An Ofqual adviser has warned that teachers will find it “much harder” to assess students’ GCSE and A-level grades this year because of the amount of learning they have lost compared with the cohort in 2020.
Barnaby Lenon, a member of the Ofqual Standards Advisory Group, told Tes that teachers would find it hard to assess pupils’ performance when so much schooling had been missed because of the pandemic, with less experienced teachers finding this particularly difficult.
He also warned that teachers would “feel the full force” of any student or parent dissatisfaction with the grades they were awarded.
“Teacher grading is not as easy as it sounds,” Mr Lenon said.
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“It will be much harder than last year because, when Covid struck in March 2020, pupils with summer exams had more or less finished the syllabus.
“Teachers had two years’ worth of evidence. This year, while some pupils have missed nothing, others have missed half the work.”
He warned that “younger teachers have little experience of grading standards”, and that, for less experienced staff, assessing the difference between a GCSE grade 5 or 6 would be challenging.
“Only those who have been examiners or have years of experience teaching exam pupils will be able to do grading with any confidence,” Mr Lenon said. “They will need to take the lead.”
He has already predicted that exam boards will have difficulty restraining “wildly inflated” teacher-assessed GCSE and A-level grades this year, resulting in “Weimar Republic levels” of inflation.
Mr Lenon’s warning about the difficulty of grading comes on the eve of the end of Ofqual and the Department for Education’s joint consultation on awarding arrangements for this year.
Under the proposals, GCSE and A-level grades this year will be awarded through teacher assessment, with students sitting external tasks set by exam boards as part of the evidence teachers will use to assign grades.
Ofqual has said these external tasks should be similar in style and format to normal exam papers.
Mr Lenon added that it was “a great relief that pupils will be awarded GCSE and A-level grades this year, based on teacher assessments”.
But he cautioned that “much detail is missing from the consultation”, pointing out that some candidates would have missed the majority of the school year.
“We are told that the teacher-assessed grades should not be exam-grade predictions but there is no clarity about how a teacher determines the grade if a pupil has missed, say, two terms out of the past three and has poor internet access at home,” he said.
“They will find the exam boards test quite hard to manage, so what evidence would be needed to show that a pupil who has missed a lot is in fact a grade A student? We do not know.”
He is also concerned about teachers’ exposure to complaints about their decisions, under the proposals for this year.
It is proposed that grades are first issued to students in early July. This will allow student appeals to be submitted immediately afterwards. Mr Lenon expects there will be a “huge” number.
“Pupils will be told their teacher-assessed grades by schools in early July. At that point, the grades are only ‘provisional’,” he said.
“Pupils will then be able to appeal to the school ‘if they think their teacher has made an error’. So, this is quite unlike appeals in a normal year and one might expect the number of appeals to be huge.
“Teachers will feel the full force of complaints from pupils and parents.”
Earlier this month, chief regulator Simon Lebus told Tes that teachers’ marking burden when grading external tasks set by exam boards would not be “much greater” than normal, although he also raised concerns about teacher workload overall this year.
Mr Lenon added that it was good that there may be allowance for learning loss and that, under Ofqual’s proposals, “there will be flexibility of question choice in the tests”.
“Details of the topics to be examined should be pre-released so pupils and teachers can focus their revision,” he said.
Headteachers have also warned against a “one-size-fits-all” approach in the use of external papers to help teachers award exam grades this summer.
Ofqual has been contacted for comment.
