We knew this year’s results days would be like none that had gone before, and so it has proved.

After weeks of mischief makers and naysayers predicting marking meltdowns, sneering at the unreliability of teachers’ assessment skills, and then a small queue of unseemly ambulance-chasing legal firms attempting to flog their appeal-writing services to disgruntled parents, these have not been the chaotic results days we were led to expect.

They have been quieter, calmer and somehow more inclusively joyful.

As a colleague of mine said today: “I’ve noticed something interesting about discussions between young people and parents this week about results: almost everyone is asking whether kids have got what they need for what they want to do next, and people seem to be talking much less about their actual results. It really feels rather healthy.”

What a difference a year makes.

In the real world 

Yet despite this year’s relative calm, we now have a motley claque of politicians and commentators pontificating from the sidelines about grade inflation, without any apparent understanding that the only way to cement grade distribution to fixed points would be by the use of some form of the statistical standardisation which ended so badly last year.

Such retrospective punditry would prove even more irritating if it were not for the fact that most people here in the real world don’t seem unduly worried about grade inflation this year. They are just happy that the young people concerned have qualifications they should feel they have earned.

Given the colossal upheaval of the past 18 months, a few more students than normal getting top grades hardly seems the social catastrophe that some suggest.

And it is pretty easy to understand that if you use a system of teacher assessment that is very different from public exams - removing the control mechanisms of standardised papers, a cohort of examiners, and the national stabiliser system we call “comparable outcomes” - then the pattern of grades couldn’t be the same.

An urgent need for more funding

Much more troubling is the increased gaps that have emerged in the statistics between outcomes in independent and state schools, between disadvantaged and other children, plus worrying trends in disparate attainment across different regions.

For a government that bangs on about levelling up, it’s not a good look. The gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is opening up disastrously.

This is why it is now so important for the government to take the issue of education recovery seriously.

This week’s results and the picture they paint ought to turbocharge a sense of governmental mission, a vision, a demonstration that the rhetoric of education being important is finally going to be matched by more than just more windy rhetoric.

And this week, there’s another big question that remains unresolved: what happens to grade standards next year and beyond following two years in which the government’s sacred adherence to comparable outcomes has been shattered?

It is quite a dilemma, as former government adviser Sam Freedman elegantly sets out in his paper for the Institute for Government earlier this week.

Do we return to the grade distribution of 2019 when public exams were last taken?

To do so would be savagely harsh on next year’s cohort. It would mean that students who have also experienced severe disruption would face more severe grading than the cohorts of the previous two years with whom they will be in competition for courses and careers.

How do we get back to normal?

It is so patently unfair that we can surely pretty much rule that out as a viable option. But where does that leave us?

Should we aim to return more gradually to 2019 grading standards, say, over the course of three years, or recalibrate the system entirely by establishing a new baseline similar to grade distribution in 2020 or 2021? And if we do the latter - accepting that there will then always be more top grades - how do we differentiate between the most able candidates?

The big problem with gradually returning to 2019 standards is that it creates more inconsistency over a longer period of time, and potential unfairness to consecutive cohorts of students.

Which, it seems, really leaves us with no other option than to establish a new baseline of grade distribution and accept that the price involved in doing so is that grades are generally higher than in the pre-Covid era.

This would have the benefit of reducing the “forgotten third” of students who experience the indignity of achieving less than a grade 4 GCSE in English and maths - though, in truth, we will still need to do more on this front.

No education system that aspires to be genuinely world-class would fixate on the top end of achievement and see the numbers gaining grade 3 or below after 11 years of schooling as being in any way tolerable.

The disadvantage of defaulting next year to 2020 standards is that it may lead to calls for more differentiation at the top end of the grading scale, given that it often seems as though the entire system is driven by the needs of the most selective universities.

But if universities want more differentiation, wouldn’t the simplest solution simply be for them to use the actual marks awarded in exams to identify the highest-performing students - the marks within, say, a grade A that show whether it’s a strong, middle or low A?

It shouldn’t seem like an insurmountable problem.

The end of GCSEs?

A final and important issue raised by all of this is the pressing need to look at our exam system itself and particularly its over-reliance on an insane number of end-of-course terminal exams, particularly at GCSE.

The frailty of our obsession with the examination industry has been ruthlessly exposed by the pandemic, and the time has surely come to consider a more sophisticated and resilient system of assessment that makes greater use of digital technology.

In fact, as is often the case at times of great challenge, there is an opportunity here to create a system that is less harsh on young people, less punitive in its deployment in accountability measures, and more fit for the future.

Here’s a chance for a government too often on the back foot finally to put young people, amid its levelling up agenda, centre stage.

And if - echoing that insight of my colleague - that means less of a fixation on grades and more humane emphasis on shaping students’ next steps in their learning, in their lives, then parents and employers are likely to thank us too.

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