“Everything,” Albert Einstein may have said, “should be made as simple as possible…but not simpler.” 

Well, his theory is about to be tested. 

Because today’s the day when we may just start to get some much-needed clarity about how students’ grades will be determined, following the cancellation of this summer’s GCSEs, A levels, and other qualifications.

Let’s hope - for the sake of the nation’s young people - that we can deliver a solution that’s simple, but not too simple. Because we really can’t leave their generation feeling they were let down, once again, by our generation. They need the reassurance that the grades they receive in August are grades that they have earned. 

But how to do that - to create a sense of fairness for students, of consistency across centres, and to retain public trust in a labyrinthine assessment industry that last summer was almost fatally undermined?

Well, first, there are no simple answers. 

GCSEs and A levels 2021: How best to be fair to students? 

On one side, there’s a view that fairness is best achieved by having a mandatory set of external assessments provided by the exam boards, which all students should sit during the summer. The sense of fairness here is that this would ensure the most consistency between centres, because they are all using a similar set of assessments. Thus a grade 5 in GCSE maths in one school is more likely to be the same standard as a grade 5 in GCSE maths in any other school.

But there’s an opposing view. This says that flexibility rather than compulsion is the key to fairness. This approach suggests that centres could be encouraged to use assessments provided by exam boards, but that these should not be mandatory. And teachers should be able to assess their students in different ways if need be. 

The argument here is that all students have seen their learning disrupted. Some have seen it so severely disrupted that we cannot risk them being tested on content they may not have covered, and thus ending up being doubly disadvantaged. 

Even if that makes consistency more difficult than it would be with a mandatory set of papers, it is a price worth paying.

What do I think? I started off on the side of the first of these arguments, with the emphasis on consistency through a common set of external or reference papers taken by all students. There are still many people who will favour that approach, but I changed my mind when the prime minister spoke on Wednesday afternoon.

A revolving door of education

His announcement that the current lockdown restrictions will continue until at least 8 March makes the disruption experienced by students - and the consequent learning loss - so wildly unpredictable that I have now to come down on the side of maximum flexibility. 

We cannot, of course, even be sure that all students will be able to return from 8 March. That will depend on whether the horrifying number of deaths, and massive pressure on the NHS, have eased to a point where the full resumption of education, involving the daily circulation of 10 million students and staff, is possible.

This extended period of restricted opening, of course, comes on top of the first lockdown, and an autumn term that was highly disrupted for many students. By the time the current restrictions come to an end, students will have spent almost a year in an educational revolving door between learning at home and learning at school. 

And while some will have done perfectly well with remote education, many others will have struggled - particularly those who need the most support. 

When the government announced the current lockdown earlier this month, it recognised the risk of these students suffering serious disadvantage if they sat a full set of exams in the summer, and so it rightly cancelled those exams. 

But this week’s extension of that period of lockdown makes the risk too great that a system of mandatory assessments will simply replicate the unfairness that this decision was meant to avoid. In truth, the argument was already finely balanced, but this week’s announcement has tipped the scales.

The need for maximum flexibility

The need for maximum flexibility is also the view of the elected members on ASCL’s teaching and learning committee, and so we’ve submitted our proposals to the Department for Education and Ofqual on that basis - a set of assessments that centres can use, but which are not mandatory. 

We don’t know where the government and regulator will end up on this issue, but we sincerely hope they listen, because these proposals come from the school leaders who will have to run the assessments this summer, and who are best placed to know what approach will produce the fairest way forward for their students.

This isn’t an abandonment of consistency, of course. We inherently know that teachers are experts in assessment, and that there is an opportunity in all of this to reaffirm that faith in the teaching profession - one that already prevails in most high-performing jurisdictions.

Our proposals call for exam boards to produce: clear resources and guidance to help guide assessment; a range of papers or banks of questions that can be used by centres on a wide range of content, with accompanying mark schemes; and a clear indication of what other types of work could be used as evidence for submitting grades. 

We also recommend a robust but proportionate quality-assurance process, which includes comparison of the submitted grades with the centre’s historical performance and prior attainment data, and allows exam boards to challenge submitted grades where there is an unexplained significant difference with previous performance.

Even so, we know that there will be those who worry that this just isn’t enough, and that only a mandatory set of assessments will do the job. 

But there’s a danger of arguing ourselves round in increasingly arcane circles, when the reality is that we need to make a judgement call on what looks from this vantage point to be the fairest way of assessing students this summer. And then we need to make it work. 

We need it to be as simple as possible, but not simpler. And it feels right to us to focus on the experience of each individual student rather than the sanctity of the system.

There’ll be a time when we have to unpick all this, as to where it leaves us with grade standards, comparable outcomes and all the unloved jargon of normal times. 

But that time isn’t now. The present is about getting through the next few months in the most pragmatic way we can, focusing on teaching rather than on endlessly testing. 

We believe, therefore, that our proposals give us the best chance of steering the steadiest and fairest course on behalf of our young people, and the adults who teach them.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders