‘Odds on legal review victory’ in GCSE fiasco

LAWYERS believe the battle to get a judicial review over the English GCSE grading fiasco has a “better than 50 per cent” chance of success, education leaders and teachers at a summit in Leeds have been told.

Leeds City Council hosted the event to keep the spotlight on a national campaign to get GCSEs regraded after it emerged that exam boards had moved their grade boundaries during the last academic year.

The authority’s executive member for children’s services, Coun Judith Blake, said yesterday that around 800 pupils in Leeds had been adversely affected by the situation.

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Across the country campaigners believe more that 60,000 students were given a D grade in English in June when they same standard of work would have earned a C had it been assessed in January.

Leeds City Council is at the 
forefront of a legal challenge involving eight councils and more than 20 schools from Yorkshire to call for a judicial review of the process.

The alliance has written to exam regulator Ofqual and exam boards AQA and EdExcel informing them of their intention to seek a judicial review.

Leeds City Council’s principal legal officer, Robert Brown, told the summit that a meeting was being held today with counsel and that official papers were set to be sent to the courts next week.

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He said that counsel’s initial opinion was that the challenge had “a reasonable chance of success”.

A High Court hearing could take up to three days although it is not yet clear when this might happen or how long schools and students will have to wait to see if exams are regraded.

Mr Brown said that AQA and Edexcel were the subject of the legal challenge because they were the most “extreme” examples of grade boundaries being moved.

However he said that if the action was successful it could result in other exam boards having to regrade exams.

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The national campaign was mounted after it emerged that the number of English exams being graded at C or above had fallen this summer and that exam boards had moved grade boundaries between January and June.

Speakers at yesterday’s summit at Leeds Town Hall from state and private schools, teaching unions and a council education boss all hit out at what has happened to young people during this summer’s exams.

John Townsley, the executive principal of both Morley and Farnley Academy, who chaired the summit, described events as “shambolic”.

Mike Gibbons the principal and chief executive of the private Grammar School at Leeds described the moving of grade boundaries as “morally reprehensible” adding “it needs to be remedied and remedied swiftly.”

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He warned, however, that schools and pupils needed more than just a legal victory which would allow them to “clear this hurdle and limp along to until we get to the next debacle”.

He called for a major reform of the examinations industry and warned that the planned reforms which will see GCSEs replaced by English Baccalaureate certificates would be undermined unless the education sector could have confidence in the way young people are being assessed.

“If schools are to be judged by their public exam performance and, for many, the funding that follows be determined by that performance then we have must have complete confidence in the probity of that process and clarity over the process of marking and the grades that are awarded at the end of it.”

Correspondence emerged last month which showed that Ofqual had pressurised Edexcel to alter its GCSE English grade boundaries just two weeks before results were published over concerns that there was likely to be a rise in C grades.

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Ofqual has said that June’s grade boundaries for English GCSE were correct, while January’s were “too lenient”.

When asked by the audience whether he believed that English papers had been marked too harshly this summer to make up for earlier mistakes, Paul Brennan Leeds City Council’s deputy director of children’s services said: “Unequivocally yes.”