Headteachers are already venting anger and expressing deep concerns about next week’s GCSE results day when they expect teachers’ centre-assessed grades (CAGs) to be heavily downgraded just as with A levels yesterday.
Headteacher Keziah Featherstone, of Q3 Academy Tipton, in the West Midlands, said she was expecting Ofqual’s moderation process to “slash” her schools’ CAGs because her school had historically underperformed - but that this would be “beyond unfair” because her school had turned the corner this year.
“I’m desperately worried,” she said. “The journey that we’ve been on over the last couple of years is perhaps greater at GCSE level [than A level] where the school has underperformed for many years, and this was the year.
A levels 2020:
“I can’t tell you how hard those kids worked, how hard the staff worked and I feel it is just going to be [a case of] ‘Well, your historical outcomes have been poor, [so] you are going to be absolutely slashed,’ and that’s how I feel our community is going to be treated next week.”
GCSE results: ‘It’s beyond unfair’
Ms Featherstone, who is also a member of the Headteachers’ Roundtable and co-founder and national leader of #WomenEd, a movement which empowers women in education, was speaking at an online panel of school leaders hosted by the Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY) think tank.
She added: “I feel exhausted, I’m done in and it’s beyond unfair. These kids have got apprenticeships lined up, they’ve got college courses lined up and they’re not going to get on to them, and other kids at other schools that have got historically better results were actually going to get lower grades than them and will take their places instead, and that’s the reality. I’m very angry.
“We saw this A level debacle coming, the profession saw it coming, we knew it was going to happen. We hoped maybe we were all wrong and we weren’t wrong - it turned out that it was worse than we thought it was going to be, so everything that I’m anticipating [about GCSEs] …you know…they’ve got a week to sort it out. I don’t think they will.
Fellow panellist Gill Pooley, headteacher of Sydenham School, in south-east London, said the situation was “very much the same,” adding “like Keziah, I’m not anticipating anything good at all”.
She said: “We’re looking at what we’re going to do in terms of enrolling students into our own sixth form.
“We’re going to look at the process of how we give students their centre-assessed grades. We’ve been giving them to students yesterday on request and we may be doing that in advance next week because we know they may be needed for the process of applying to sixth forms.”
