Spare a thought for next year’s A-level students

Three years ago I was contacted by an official at the Department for Education to see if I was interested in becoming a non-executive director of Ofqual, the exams regulator. There have been times since when I’ve regretted turning down that offer, but this week was not one of them. Ofqual was given the unenviable task of awarding A-level and GCSE grades to students in England who, thanks to the lockdown, had not sat their exams; and it was inevitably criticised by those children and their parents who felt they should have done better, not to mention various enemies of the government who treated Ofqual as a proxy for Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary. The regulator’s humiliation was complete when Williamson announced on Monday that if Ofqual had awarded a student a lower grade in a subject than that predicted by their teacher, they could give themselves the higher mark instead.

Almost everyone took the side of the disappointed children, but I’m not convinced they were so hard done by. After all, the percentage of children awarded A*/A by Ofqual was higher this year than the percentage who achieved A*/A last year. True, the attainment gap between privately educated and state–educated pupils increased year-on-year, but then private schools were generally more conscientious about providing remote lessons during lockdown, so that seems reasonable. And since the effect of Williamson’s retreat has been to increase that attainment gap, not reduce it, that suggests Ofqual had treated the predictions of private school teachers with more scepticism than those of state-school teachers.

Whatever harm the government may have prevented by its U-turn will have been more than offset by the harm it has done to next year’s cohort of A-level students, of which my daughter is one.