My first reaction on reading the Ofqual consultation on awarding GCSE, AS and A-level grades in summer 2021 was - to put it mildly - outrage. 

It seems as if, by “trusting teachers”, the government and exams regulator have found a neat way of shifting the work and the blame for any consequences of this year’s mess on to schools and colleges. 

We may have fallen for that line last year but we shouldn’t make the same mistake again.

By foisting the marking of externally set “tests” (mini-exams under any other name) on to teachers, the awarding bodies are getting the marking workforce not only on the cheap, not just free, in fact - schools are actually paying for the privilege. It doesn’t get much better than that for them, if you consider that, in former years, there was a desperate shortage of markers for the core subjects, English in particular. 

Behind the scenes, teachers have been stitched up and forced into examining the work of the 2021 cohort, with all the stresses that many would have liked to avoid.

Exams 2021: teachers as unpaid examiners

Ofqual wraps it up thus in Section 4.1: “To support them, we propose the exam boards could provide guidance and training, along with papers, which teachers could use to assess their students.

“The teacher, through the marking of the papers, could consider the evidence of the student’s work and use that to inform their assessment of the grade deserved. The exam boards could also sample teachers’ marking as part of the external quality-assurance arrangements.”

There is no mention of remuneration for this marking - no doubt because the exam boards and government can see the danger of making a precedent of having to pay teachers for work beyond their already mountainous Covid workload.

While there may be teachers who have fewer students to assess, for others with two or more exam-year groups - not to mention FE lecturers who teach even more resit GCSE classes - the additional marking could well tip them over the edge. This really isn’t the point at which to test the Herculean qualities of the profession.

Some teachers may embrace the opportunity to resurrect a community of practice around examining: a consensus about standards that largely died off after coursework was abandoned in the 2015 reformed qualifications. Who could argue against such worthy pedagogical idealism?

But the self-sacrifice of the idealistic few shouldn’t necessarily be extended to others, no less noble but rather more time-strapped.

Last year, examiners were quite rightly frustrated by the decision of exam boards not to employ them. Many suffered the consequences of lost income. Not all boards treated their markers well.

And while Ofqual adviser Barnaby Lenon has spotted that examining expertise is thin on the ground, he doesn’t really appreciate just how much is being foisted on to hapless schools and teachers. When he suggests that teacher-examiners should take the lead, he overlooks the fact that not every school or department will have even one examiner. 

If it isn’t easy for exam boards to train teachers to be examiners in just one session, how can schools be expected to do so in-house, under Covid conditions? Real expertise takes a number of years to be properly embedded. 

However, there is a pool of existing examiners ready to work, willing and able to take on a fair chunk of external test marking, wanting to apply the expert judgement they have developed over many sessions. 

The possibility of endless appeals - and legal threats

If examining is left to teachers, will we see schools facing endless appeals? Students will no doubt get their papers back and compare results within their year group. And eagle-eyed parents will get together with friends whose children go to other institutions to see whether they can find a case for appealing against a final grade - especially where a university place is at stake. To leave any room for questioning of this nature is to undermine the whole summer’s results - again.

In 2020, one of the most powerful arguments against allowing centre-assessed grades to go ahead was that teachers would be unable to be impartial because of “unconscious bias”. 

The fact that it is now 2021 doesn’t mean this concern will go away. The accusation of bias leaves a feeling of insecurity for students and teachers alike, and undermines public confidence.

Even the proposal that exam boards should be employed to moderate the judgements of teachers falls far short of ensuring such confidence. Moderation processes for non-examined assessment (that is: coursework) are superficial at the best of times, especially if you consider how few files large centres have to submit, while small centres have their whole cohort moderated. 

Just how secure will the moderation of a centre’s evidence be this summer, if small samples are used? It would be understandable for exam boards to sample lightly, given the complex, time-consuming job of contextualising the evidence of students’ work according to how much time students will have missed, and making judgements about what can be reasonably expected.

Then there is the not-inconsiderable problem of ensuring that the school is consistent to the standard which is used to assess the cohort - and in line with national standards.

Surely, then, the simplest - and best - way to avoid eroding public confidence further is to get the awarding bodies to play their part by supplying examiners who have no previous connections with the schools whose papers they mark.

If the externally set mini-exams were also externally marked, they would provide a measure against whatever internal evidence was being used to show the abilities and performance of students. Last year, the fallout came when some schools were seen as being unfairly generous when their results were measured against their historic performance over the past three years. Leaving all the judgement with teachers risks similar dissatisfaction this summer.

When exams are externally marked, candidates are able to appeal to the exam board if they feel the marking was unfair. 

The further danger of schools being left to do all the assessing is that students who have grievances will be left dissatisfied if they don’t win their appeals. The wealthiest may even be able to employ lawyers and experts to challenge a school - in which case, schools often have to roll over.

Last year was unprecedented, but the conditions of this year are not; they have been foreseen for nearly a year. We need to learn the lessons now. 

The sad truth is that, however the assessment of this year’s cohorts is managed, there will be fallout. Last year, schools and colleges had to mop up the mess. This year, let’s leave it to the professionals.

Yvonne Williams has spent nearly 34 years in the classroom, and 22 years as a head of English. She is co-author of “How Accurate Can A-level English Literature Marking Be?” published in the National Association for the Teaching of English journal, English in Education