Education needs more than a U-turn – it’s time to rethink post-16 education

The chaos and unfairness of this year’s A level results has been compounded by a dizzying number of U-turns. The latest comes only after student protest and a public outcry the scale of which few of us in education can recall.

So, finally, and only after Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland announced their decision, England’s A level and GCSE grades will be based on teachers’ calculated grades. Few will have the energy to cheer. It has been an exhausting few days, leaving many students distraught and parents and teachers completely powerless up against the constantly changing advice. Getting a grip on what was happening was like trying to pick up mercury.

It was bad enough that the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual)’s stubborn insistence on a set of controversial algorithms downgraded 40% of all A level students, and that they were the worst A level results for three years. It was even worse that the vast majority of those affected by the botched algorithms were all state-educated and disadvantaged.

None of this seemed to move the cold hearts of Ofqual.

As if all this were not enough, Ofqual was warned. When senior academics and amateur statisticians rushed to tell Ofqual their algorithms were flawed they were ignored, asked to sign NDAs, or laughed at. It was obvious even to the most maths-illiterate that the smaller class sizes of private schools would leave them untouched by a crudely applied formula designed to ensure state schools’ grades matched those of last year.

Ludicrous logic, given that the stripping down of our education system to narrowly measurable outcomes is justified by discourses of raising attainment and social mobility.

This year’s A level results fiasco and the knock-on effect on access to university have effectively engineered a massive ‘levelling down’ for working class students, hitting the most disadvantaged teenagers hardest of all.

Ofqual’s public consultation

Those of us who managed to complete Ofqual’s impenetrable public consultation survey on proposals for this year’s GCSE and A levels could see that the system was impossibly rigged.

Most worrying of all was that there was no opportunity to object to the absurdity of teachers being made to rank students. Not only is it humanly impossible to rank cohorts of anything from 20 to 200 students accurately – a single A level subject may be taught in four different groups by four different teachers – but it is grossly unfair on young people to have hours of study and effort reduced to a rank order.

The fact that Ofqual refused to listen to NEU arguments that this part of the grading system should be abandoned, and ignored esteemed statisticians who warned algorithms based on these crude rankings were fundamentally flawed, must make us question whether Ofqual can ever be trusted again.

So huge is their failing, that it is hard to see how they can dig themselves out of the mess they have made not just of young people’s grades, but their dreams too.

What happens next?

By downgrading thousands of students, university admissions are thrown into chaos.

Promises by Clare Marchant, Chief Executive UCAS, that universities will be ‘flexible’ and keep places open until everything is sorted out are a nonsense. In fact, universities have been busily giving away their places just as fast as they can and, because privately educated students have escaped Ofqual’s algorithms and scooped an unpreceded number of teacher-predicted A*/As this year, they are being filled by middle-class students.

Asking universities not to fill up their places with such rich pickings is a bit like asking John Lewis to keep their most expensive sofas off the shop floor for poorer customers who might win the lottery next month.

It’s probably safe to say that widening participation is only happening for the most privileged this year. So, that’s another bit of the Government’s education-as-a passport-to-social-mobility gone up in smoke. 

Call me cynical, but I suspect the ugly truth of all this is that it was felt to be acceptable by the Government, DfE and Ofqual, for the thousands of state educated, mostly disadvantaged students, to serve as collateral damage in this year’s A level fiasco.

The weaknesses of a system totally reliant on exams

The root cause of this disaster is a final assessment system which focuses exclusively on a single set of exams.

Had coursework and AS levels still been part of our A level system there would have been a formal record of prior attainment to guide teachers’ calculation to students’ grades. Formal moderation of grades would also have been relatively straightforward.

Many of have been feeling increasingly powerless as we have watched post-16 education being slowly destroyed through a lack of funding and an arid exam-focused curriculum.

The skills of independent enquiry, argumentation, evaluation and analysis which once formed such essential parts of A level study and the excitement of research, discovery and application key to the project work of BTECs, have been all but lost. We need to revolutionise our approach to post-16.

A new approach to the post-16 curriculum

The Covid pandemic and the closure of schools have demonstrated the inadequacies of an assessment system totally dependent on formal exams.

Increasingly more useful to Government as a means to assess school performance, A levels have become unrecognisable as means of delivering a meaningful education for young people in 2020.

We are the only country in the developed world which believes focusing on just three subjects equips young people for their transition to university, work or training.

We might salvage something from the wreckage of this year’s A level disaster if we took this crisis as an opportunity to re-design the post-16 curriculum.

Far more exciting, rewarding and useful, would be a curriculum which offered every young person in post-16 education the opportunity to study a combination of academic, creative and/or applied subjects, with the opportunity to specialise, or weight, their subject choices according to the areas where they felt most confident.

Assessment for this kind of curriculum would be based on a combination of formal exams, continual teacher assessment and project and/or coursework, both of these moderated through a rigorous network of teacher subject specialists drawn from a variety of schools.

Never again would a breakdown of the exam system mean there was nothing on which to formally assess students.

More importantly, never again would the assessment of young people’s attainment lie in the hands of those who lacked a deep knowledge of education and who cared even less about young people and their futures.

Dr Nuala Burgess, Brentford & Isleworth CLP

Dr Nuala Burgess is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education at King’s College London. A former secondary school teacher, she now researches school sixth forms and the post-school transitions of sixth formers. She is also the Chair of Comprehensive Future which campaigns for the abolition of the 11+ and fair school admissions.