Prominent Tory MPs, the National Union of Students and school chiefs are among those putting pressure on the government to scrap 100,000 A-level grades.
After coronavirus cancelled exams, pupils’ grades were determined by a statistical model that took into account their teachers’ own assessments but also, crucially, the historic performance of the school.
It was an algorithm that saw 40% of pupils face grade reductions, most severely in schools that had seen historically lower marks.
The Scottish government U-turned on a similar marking system a week earlier after students took to the streets, confirming pupils would instead be able to keep their teacher-assessed grades.
Education secretary Gavin Williamson has previously ruled out a similar reversal in the rest of the UK, but it emerged on Monday that the government could perform a U-turn after all.
A No.10 spokesperson refused to rule out changes to the system, which has seen the widespread downgrading of pupils’ results, and an announcement is expected within hours.
Here’s everyone who wants the government to admit it made a mistake.
Tory MPs
Cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt became the first government MP to break rank and criticise the exams chaos on Monday morning.
While she fell short of calling for an all-out U-turn, she addressed the fact that taking a year out to resit exams or wait for appeals to be returned is simply not an option for many students.
She wrote on Twitter: “This group of young people have lost out on so much already, we must ensure that bright, capable students can progress on their next step.
“Delaying a year won’t be an option, and it shouldn’t be an option. For many it will mean falling out of education...”
A growing number of Conservative MPs have followed suit, with Roger Gale, the MP for North Thanet, saying that the government should adopt “teacher recommendations for this year only” in England. Lucy Allan, the MP for Telford, also said it was “simply not feasible to decide these issues by algorithm”.
Former Tory leader and Iain Duncan Smith was one of the MPs calling on the government on Monday morning to “put it right” and let pupils use mock results or teacher assessments for their grades.
He told LBC’s Nick Ferrari: “The idea that you have an algorithm to figure out what they might have done in an exam is really impossible and I think that’s where the big mistakes will be made.
“I certainly would like the government to say now: ’Look, forget it. We’ll go to the universities and talk to them about accepting people and working it through at the other end, particularly with GCSEs.’”
Former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson said: “Surely there must have been a better way than this.”
She told Times Radio: “The education secretary needs to get out on the television, he needs to be telling people what’s going on.”
Kenneth Baker, a former education secretary who oversaw the abolition of O-levels in the 1980s, also proposed delaying the publication of GCSE results as he criticised the “unfair and barely explicable downgrades” last week which “helped smaller private schools”.
Sixth Form Colleges Association
The Sixth Form Colleges Association (SFCA) revealed on Monday that A-level grades from its members had fallen below the three-year average, after analysing 65,000 exam entries in 41 A-level subjects.
Grades awarded to students in 2020 were lower in every single subject – and had particularly impacted pupils at larger sixth form colleges.
An article on their website states “the model has not only failed to produce ‘broadly similar’ results, but has in fact produced worse results in every single subject.”
Leaders at the association are calling for the model to be rerun to provide more accurate grates, or abandoned altogether.
Bill Watkin, SFCA’s chief executive said: “There simply isn’t time to conduct a wholesale review of the system, or to force colleges and schools through the sort of appeals process envisaged by the government. As each day passes, the strain on students increases and more young people miss out on their chosen university or employment destination. ”
“Ofqual should therefore immediately recalibrate and rerun the model to provide all students with an accurate grade, and provide an assurance that this will be no lower than the calculated grade they have already received.
“Should this still fail to produce results that are broadly similar to previous years, students should be awarded the grades predicted by teachers (known as centre assessed grades).”
The Labour Party
Speaking on results day, August 13, Labour leader Keir Starmer tweeted: “Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with this year’s exam results.”
Amid the news that almost 40% of pupils had seen their grades marked down and stories of would-be university students who had seen their hopes dashed by their mathematically-adjusted grades, Starmer said the system had “fundamentally failed them”.
He called on the government to “urgently rethink” its approach, guaranteeing the right to individual appeals and for the fee for appeals to be waived (which the government has since done).
Crucially, he asked for “nothing to be ruled out, including the U-turn that was forced on the Scottish government last week”.
To date, almost 90,000 people have signed the party’s petition calling for the government to rethink its approach on A-level results.
Shadow education minister Kate Green also called for the possibility of a U-turn to remain in the mix, describing the situation for many students on results day as a “huge injustice”.
Speaking on Thursday she said: “Ministers must act urgently to correct the injustice faced by so many young people today. Students must be able to lodge their own appeals if they haven’t got the grade they deserved and admissions teams must be forced to be more flexible.
“No student should see their dreams slip away because of this government’s inaction.”
National Union of Students
The National Union of Students published a petition calling for a U-turn on the standardised graded almost immediately after A-level grades came out on Thursday, stating that the government had chosen “to reproduce and bake in educational inequality through the use of ridiculous algorithms”.
Specifically in response to the way in which the algorithm has most severely impacted students from larger or historically underperforming schools – while benefiting pupils at smaller, independent schools – the union has issued four demands.
Number one on that list is to give all students their teacher-assessed grades, without moderation.
The demands also include introducing a “fair and free appeals process for all students to combat any instances of racist, classist or other discrimination”, an overhaul of the current system of exams and grading, and further investment to “end educational inequality”.
Good Law Project
Following the headlines about the huge disparity in grades between larger schools and colleges in deprived areas and much smaller, private schools, The Good Law Project – which has mounted a number of high-profile challenges against the government in the past – said it was considering legal action.
On Sunday the project announced it was launching proceedings against governmental department Ofqual, which regulates qualifications, exams and tests in England.
Representing six young people who have been directly impacted – and receiving emails from hundreds more – the organisation said in a statement: “Of course this disaster has not been visited on rich and poor alike. The data shows – and clearly – that it is hitting poorer kids above richer, and state school kids more than private.”
In a letter sent to Ofqual, lawyers said that the department’s system for standardising results had given “rise to an unacceptable risk of procedural unfairness”, adding that it had breached “its obligation to ensure that ‘regulated qualifications give a reliable indication of knowledge, skills and understanding’ and to ‘promote public confidence in regulated qualifications’.
In order to address the “systemic” issues with Ofqual’s processes, the Good Law Project have demanded the department revise the present system.
A spokesperson added: “Our claim requires Ofqual to revise the present system, which is unfair and unlawful. Such unfairness might be remedied by creating a merits-based appeal right for those students whose Centre Assessment Grade has been downgraded and resetting the system so that students’ grades can be downgraded by one grade at most.”
The legal team have asked for a response by 4pm on Wednesday, August 2019. If they don’t get one, they plan to start legal proceedings.
Thousands of students
While MPs, lawyers, and unions have all come out in support of a total overhaul of the A-level grading process, it’s the students themselves who have perhaps made their voices heard most clearly as they campaign against an unfair system.
Hundreds of A-level students marched to Downing Street on Friday and Sunday, urging the government to perform a U-turn and allow them to use their teacher-assessed or mock exam grades.
Many on Sunday were seen holding signs reading “trust our teachers” as the students gathered in Parliament Square, chanting “fuck Gavin Williamson” and “fuck Eton”.
Thousands of pupils also took to social media – either to share their own stories of being downgraded or to stand in solidarity with those who had been denied university places as a result of the government’s standardisation process.
Ted Mellow, 18, from Wood Green in north London – one of the organisers of the demonstration – told the PA news agency: “Everywhere you look, people are either angry or confused and, quite frankly, that’s the government’s fault.
“We’re not fighting so that everyone gets A*s and As because we know that’s unrealistic. We’re fighting so that people get the grades they deserve.”
He added: “The government needs to be held accountable for their lack of responsibility.
“It just seems like they’re not confident in their systems and, if they’re not confident, why should I be confident?”