In a “war room” near Gavin Williamson’s office in August 2020, officials and advisers sat around a flip chart with the words: “U-turn – what we are going to do?”
After days of resistance, the government confirmed GCSE and A-level pupils would be awarded teacher grades, rather than those standardised by what become known as the “mutant algorithm”.
Earlier that week, nearly 40 per cent of A-level results had been downgraded after exams were cancelled during Covid.
The usual images of pupils jumping for joy were replaced by pictures of youngsters in tears.
Schools Week looks back on how – despite the spectacular failure – exams survived their greatest test …
Covid chaos
It’s hard to forget the chaos of that summer. It started with Scotland backtracking on its standardised grades on August 11, 2020.
Despite this, and two days after those images of distraught youngsters, then education secretary Williamson was insistent: “No U-turn, no change”.
But it unravelled the same day when Ofqual published guidance on using mock exam grades in appeals – which was sensationally withdrawn hours later.
Within 48 hours, ministers announced pupils would receive their teacher grades. Williamson resigned but Boris Johnson, wouldn’t accept it, one former adviser recalls.
How did we end up here?
Ofqual originally suggested holding exams with extra safety precaution, or awarding alternative qualifications to GCSE or A-levels. But these options were “politically unpalatable”, says Roger Taylor, its former chair.
Instead, Williamson told the regulator to award grades without exams, but to ensure “qualification standards are maintained and the distribution of grades follows a similar profile to that in previous years”.
Angus Walker, who was Williamson’s special adviser, says there was a “consensus” among politicians and unions that moderation was required to keep a lid on “the big evil” grade inflation.
Schools were asked to grade pupils on what they were most likely to have achieved, then put them in a rank order.
Exam boards then used Ofqual’s statistical model to standardise grades, looking at expected grade distributions at a national level, schools’ results in previous years and prior attainment of pupils.
And while grade inflation was kept at bay, the consequence was pupils missing out on university places.
It wasn’t just that. Poorer pupils were more likely to be downgraded, whereas private schools enjoyed the biggest rise in results.
Pupils told me they didn’t want Covid grades
‘Exams are a human story’
“The system did what it was meant to do, it just did it in a way that threw up oddities,” says Walker.
“In hindsight, the whole process lost sight of the fact that exams are a human story. It’s not a machine process.”
Taylor adds: “The error was thinking it was a reasonable thing to ask people to have their lives disrupted on the basis of an estimate. There was a failure to realise how insulting this was.”
Loic Menzies, a visiting fellow at the Sheffield Institute of Education, says policymakers tend to “bias” towards the system, rather than individual. “But given how much these pupils had already suffered, it’s no surprise the usual approach blew up in their faces”.
While it was “obvious” that any downgrade would feel “really awful” for a pupil, there wasn’t time for a “massive communications campaign”, says Michelle Meadows, deputy chief regulator at the time.
“How the algorithm worked was very technical. People didn’t really understand the true impact of what they were being consulted on, because if they did, they wouldn’t have been so positive about it.”
The whole process lost sight of the fact that exams are a human story
Exams were cancelled again in 2021, but the government “put its trust in teachers rather than algorithms”, with light quality checks from exam boards.
However, in 2021, the decisions were made by a new team. Ofqual chief regulator Sally Collier and Department for Education permanent secretary Jonathan Slater had been moved on in August. Taylor stood down in December.
Unsurprisingly, light-touch regulation led to big increases in grades. The proportion of A-levels graded A and above rose from 25.2 per cent to 44.3 per cent.
With exams cancelled two years running, critics saw an opportunity. One review, from the Tony Blair Institute, concluded GCSEs and A-levels should be scrapped.
When Dr Jo Saxton took over as chief regulator in September 2021, she was focused on “upholding public confidence” in exams.
Learning lessons from 2020, she undertook a “listening tour” across the country and says pupils told her they didn’t want “in their words ‘Covid grades’, they wanted grades that would stand them instead through the rest of their lives”.
But Saxton didn’t think Ofqual could keep public confidence while lurching back to pre-pandemic grading standards. So the grade inflation was to be wound back gradually over two years.
Covid’s silver lining?
However, the grading standard post-Covid is more generous.
A-level pupils this year achieved the best set of top grades since at least 2010, despite the supposed Covid learning loss.
While Ofqual may face questions in the long-term about the more generous grading standards, exams seem to have survived. And that’s despite the Covid U-turn debacle, which Simon Case, who was then the government’s most senior civil servant, described as the “most awful governing I think I’ve ever seen”.
But the transition back to exams and normal grading standards “had a plan, was pragmatic and not too ideological”, one ex-adviser says. Because of this, exams have “come through with flying colours”, they add.
They claim that when exams were cancelled in January 2021, there was an “attempted organised resignation” from Ofqual board members who wanted to “protect the importance of exams and the importance of proper assessment”. But this showed a “complete ideological lack of pragmatism”.
Sir Ian Bauckham, Ofqual chief regulator, says the “silver lining” is that despite the disruption, including the “practical workload challenge” of teacher grades, “we understood the value of having fit-for-purpose external assessment to preserve the reputation of those qualifications”.
Not everyone agrees. Peter Hyman, a founder of Rethinking Assessment, believes the pandemic made parents “realise just how narrow the exams system is”.
Liz Robinson, the chief executive at Big Education academy trust, also thinks there was a missed opportunity.
“Covid was assertively used to say let’s get back to normal as soon as possible. There was no intellectual curiosity at all about how we might think about things differently.”
What does the future hold?
Exams in some form are here to stay, with Labour committed to protecting their “important role”.
But there are some broader and big issues that the government wants to resolve.
Research by the National Foundation for Educational Research found pupils are studying a narrower range of subjects post-16 compared with 20 years ago.
Reasons include former education secretary Michael Gove’s decoupling of AS and A-levels.
Barnaby Lenon, a former Ofqual adviser, says it means one subject has “basically been lost. I’m not saying Gove was wrong, but I think it’s a pity we’ve gone from four subjects down to three”.
If we want a broader curriculum, then it makes no sense to have a narrow exam system. We need knowledge-rich, but we also need skills-rich, character-rich
Hyman adds: “If we want a broader curriculum, then it makes no sense to have a narrow exam system. We need knowledge-rich, but we also need skills-rich, character-rich and a broader assessment system to follow that.”
Hyman’s Rethinking Assessment has called for a “learner profile”, including a link to a portfolio, endorsements from work experience employers and achievements out of school.
But David Laws, a former schools minister who worked alongside Gove, says the public recognises the GCSE and A-level brand. “What seems attractive to politicians in conference speeches doesn’t always serve the interests of young people or teachers.
“When you introduce new brands – like the T-level – that are devised by politicians over a short period of time, there’s risk that they don’t bed in and before they do, they’ve been replaced.”
He thinks the debate should focus on “removing the wedge” between academic and technical qualifications.
“It would help to ensure people are choosing qualifications that suit their needs and interests rather than feeling there are some qualifications they can’t pursue because they have a lower status associated with them.”
Another issue likely to be revisited is the balance between exams and non-examined elements – like coursework. More oral exams are also on the agenda given Labour’s interest in oracy.
Another likely change is the move to on-screen exams. Reza Schwitzer, AQA’s external affairs director, says it’s “largely an implementation challenge” – such as having enough computers and space in schools.
But Bauckham says the “important rider is we must do these things in a way that is fair to everybody”.
