Read on Twitter
I’ve collected my thoughts and tweets on the resolution of the A level results saga in a thread. It felt cathartic to do so. Please do take a moment of your time to read it if you can.
Back in April/May, schools were asked to produce Centre Assessment Grades (CAGs) at the same time as moving their entire educational offer online in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schools did this with little fuss or fanfare throughout the Easter holidays and beyond. Indeed, in my experience, teachers carried out this task with a great deal of care and bucket loads of professionalism.
To be clear: CAGs are not predicted grades. They were conceived as a teacher’s holistic assessment of the grade that pupils should be—rather than might be—awarded in each subject.
They are based on assessment data, class work and homework combined with a teacher’s professional judgment.
As such, I found the phenomenon, last Thursday, of schools celebrating their ‘results’, many which bore no relation to CAGs, strange. Some 40% of them were the outcome of a statistical model over which schools had no control.
To be laying claim to these results, then, while simultaneously lambasting the algorithm appeared Janus-esque.
Last Thursday also saw @ofqual and @educationgovuk finally reveal the workings of a statistical process which resulted in significant downgrades to long-considered CAGs, awarding Us to pupils who never sat exams,
apologising and not apologising for the mess they oversaw, and, releasing and rescinding appeals criteria within a matter of hours. Although @ofqual and the @dfe asked for CAGs, they seemingly ignored them when the class was larger than 15 pupils.
They relied on historic data trends, until it was clear that, in some cases, they did not. They said they would announce results in July, but July became August without explanation.
They became obsessed with grade inflation, but ended up inflating grades. They strove for fairness in the most unfair way imaginable. They claimed to be listening and responsive, while being impervious to the tenor of the debate and advice around them.
They claimed to want to engage with teachers in this process but in many cases ignored their advice. And, when they did ask for help from others, they could only provide it if you signed an non-disclosure agreement. Cf. @RoyalStatSoc
The apolitical @ofqual became a political football with the goalposts who knows where..!
They asked us to put faith in the system and yet committed the most egregious acts in the name of political dogma. They didn’t treat humans as humans, but numbers on a unwieldy spreadsheet of futures pre-destined but, in some cases, unfairly taken away.
They expected schools and parents to pick up the pieces and navigate a sea of unfairness and uncertainty with no direction, and not even a compass to hand!
What is more, they did this as schools were helping pupils with the usual maelstrom of @ucas_online clearing, writing lengthy appeals and preparing for a COVID-secure start to the new academic year.
Today, the chair of @ofqual was left to be the fall guy on @BBCNews. He seemed surprised that the algorithm was unjust and that this left pupils stressed.
It seemed no-one could foresee the fact that if you downgrade those who are receiving the highest possible grades, this would have a cumulative ‘landslide’ effect on those lower down.
That this caused those hardworking pupils undue stress and anxiety is a surprise to nobody who lives or works with children, nor anybody who has a keen sense of fairness.
@GavinWilliamson shied away from the cameras today. We tell our pupils to ‘own’ their mistakes, so it is regrettable that the Education Secretary didn’t set an example to a group of pupils who now become part of the electorate, if they have not done so already.
The last few days have been filled with frustration, but it felt like a new low to learn that the decision to accept CAGs was not made because it was the right thing to do. Instead, it was done because they couldn’t cope with the gargantuan workload they had created:
In reinstating CAGs, @ofqual and @educationgovuk have passed the problem to universities. The cap on numbers has been lifted, but will universities be able to honour all of the original offers that have now been met whilst admitting those who gained places that others had missed?
This question is given extra piquancy because its not just anout physical space but public health given the COVID pandemic. The time to ask serious questions of @ofqual and @GavinWilliamson et al. will come. For now, our focus must be on our pupils who have had a torrid few days.
I’d like to extend my thanks to them, and to the teachers and leaders in my own school—and beyond—for their agility, determination and courage in the face of a sorry mess that could—and should—have been avoided.
