Thousands of students to resit GCSEs as exam furore deepens

New figures show that one in 14 students – more than 45,000 in total – who took the qualification in the summer have opted to re-take exams,

Councillor Judith Blake, Leeds City Council’s executive member for children’s services, warned that offering resits was an inadequate response and that campaigners were determined to get papers regraded.

Leeds has played a key role in a national campaign to get English GCSEs re-marked after it emerged that exam boards had moved the grade boundaries between January and June.

It left thousands of students receiving a D grade this summer when the same work would have earned a C at the start of the year.

A national alliance of councils, including eight from Yorkshire, schools, pupils, and teaching unions are calling for a judicial review in order to get pupils exams marked in line with the January grade boundaries.

At a summit in Leeds earlier this week Coun Blake said 800 pupils in Leeds had been adversely affected by the situation.

She said: “These resits are an inadequate response. It is not appropriate for pupils to resit and it is likely to be the most vulnerable students who do not take up this opportunity.”

One school leaders’ union said the numbers were “higher than expected”, and warned that offering students an extra chance to resit was not the answer to the ongoing GCSE English fiasco.

Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “We’ve said all along this is not the solution, because if the exams are graded in the same way as they were in the summer then students will still find their results are down.

“What this shows is that it is a gross injustice that this vast number of students are being subjected to go through a re-sit when the fact is this is not their fault.” He added that the numbers re-taking all, or part of the course, are “higher than expected, and shows the extent of the problem”.

Figures from four exam boards, AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC, show that more than 45,000 candidates have opted to take part in the November resit.

Of these, the majority, around 32,000, are candidates with the AQA board. This is because AQA has a high number of GCSE English students, with 380,000 sitting the qualification in the summer.

Both OCR and Edexcel each have around 4,300 candidates taking part in the resit, and WJEC, the Welsh exam board, has around 4,700.

Mr Lightman said that some of those planning to resit “will have already missed out on opportunities”, and that the results of the November exams will be “too late for them to start things this year”.

The row over the English exams broke out as national GCSE results were published in August. Ofqual conducted an inquiry into the fiasco, which concluded that January’s GCSE English assessments were “graded generously” but the June boundaries were properly set and candidates’ work properly graded.

The regulator insisted it would be inappropriate for either of the sets of exams to be regraded. Instead, students will be given a chance to resit the GCSE in November.

In Wales, education minister Leighton Andrews ordered the WJEC exam board to regrade Welsh students’ English papers.

As a result, last month nearly 2,400 pupils who took English with the exam board received better results, after a review of the marking system.