The forgotten victims of the deflated A-level grades

A few weeks ago, I spoke on The Spectator’s podcast about my A-Level results. My story in short: I lost my dream place at UCL to study medicine (my conditional offer was: A*AA) after being downgraded by the algorithm to AABB. As the daughter of a single mother, in a low income household, I’m not exactly the sort of person expected to score top grades (especially not by the now-defunct algorithm). However, with a run of 9s and A*s in my GCSEs, I proved I could beat the odds once, and, had I sat the 2020 exams, I am confident I would have beaten the odds again. But the virus struck – exams were abandoned, and pupils like me never got the chance to prove themselves. You might perhaps think: ‘but didn’t Gavin Williamson U-turn?’ or ‘hasn’t the algorithm been ignored by using Centre Assessed Grades, meaning many students are actually getting high grades?’ This is certainly the case for a number of students, but not ones like myself.