Exams fiasco will never be forgotten by ‘Red Wall’ towns like Rotherham – Chris Read

FOR 18-year-olds everywhere, it’s been a rotten year. Very few people will look back fondly on 2020, but the months around your 18th birthday feel particularly difficult ones to face without human contact.
There remains uproar over the marking of A-level and GCSE exams.There remains uproar over the marking of A-level and GCSE exams.
There remains uproar over the marking of A-level and GCSE exams.

That moment when you arrive into your own adult identity, either striding confidently or tiptoeing nervously, is not intended to take place during lockdown. The one upside ought to have been that the dreaded exams were no more.

But if anyone in government had asked an A-level Maths student about the difficulties of modelling exam results by imposing caps and quotas based on previous years’ performance they would probably have received a better critique in response than that apparently given by Gavin Williamson.

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Bigger classes were always going to be worse affected, because the pull of the average is felt more strongly in the algorithm. Improving schools were going to do worse, because they’re tied to previous years’ results.

Chris Read is the leader of Rotherham Council.Chris Read is the leader of Rotherham Council.
Chris Read is the leader of Rotherham Council.

Schools in more deprived areas were going to do worse because they were denied the ability to control their own destiny.

Or looked at another way, irrespective of how hard you’ve worked, the skills you’ve gained, how every piece of work you’ve ever done has been marked, you were going to get the grades the computer wants you to. It didn’t take the finest minds in academia to see it.

In the end, it played out in Rotherham just as it did elsewhere. At Brinsworth Academy, more than half of all grades were marked down from teacher assessments. Aston Academy reported a quarter of all students having two or more grades marked down. Wales High School reported 84 per cent of students affected.

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My old sixth form college, Thomas Rotherham, reported pass rates lower in 40 per cent of their A-level courses than last year. Wickersley Sports College, which sits just outside the ward that I represent and is usually South Yorkshire’s highest performing state school, reported 43 per cent of grades changed, with some marked down from an A straight to a D.

Are exams the best way of judging the work of students?Are exams the best way of judging the work of students?
Are exams the best way of judging the work of students?

In an open letter to the Education Secretary, the headteacher at Wickersley, Elaine Renavent, wrote: “I have never, in my 31 years in the profession, felt as upset, frustrated and helpless as I do today, and find myself at a loss how to support and reassure a cohort of students who are entitled to expect much better from the adults making sweeping decisions about their futures.”

Residents of places like Rotherham noted with grim realisation that the same system had awarded students of Latin and Classical Greek, who are much more likely to sit in smaller classes in independent and private schools, a 10 per cent increase in the number of A* and A grades according to the charity Upreach.

So the inevitable climbdown in favour of accepting teacher assessments of grades – however imperfect – is welcome. It took the Government too long, and too many students will have missed out on the university place or next step that they would have wanted to take as a result. There will doubtless be other unforeseen consequences before we are through this.

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But let no one be in any doubt that we didn’t just stumble into this situation. During his time as Education Secretary, Michael Gove told us that exams were the best available criterion of attainment.

Coursework was a soft option. AS-level results were no longer a halfway house en route to an A-level. If the Gove reforms had never happened, students would have achieved four fifths of the score towards their final grade by March and the beginning of lockdown.

But no. The Government decided that a few hours of writing over the course of a few days was a better assessment. And so, when those days were unexpectedly cancelled, the hapless Mr Williamson was left clutching his algorithm.

Before December, those of us living in the so-called “Red Wall” seats became the most important people in the world to the Conservative Party. They placed adverts on the internet to tell us how, after a decade of cuts, they wanted to give us more money.

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They said that the Brexit places like Rotherham voted for was what the Tories were really after. But this week they failed the first real test since then, because they didn’t really understand the schools and the ambitions of the people who live here. Their screeching U-turn has prevented the worst possible consequences, but many of our families now know where they stand with this Government.

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James Mitchinson

Editor

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