Backlash Forces Boris Johnson Into U-Turn on England Exam Grades

Boris Johnson’s government backed down over this year’s pandemic-affected exam results in the face of parent and student outrage, saying English children will be graded based on their teachers’ assessments.

“It is clear that the process of allocating grades has resulted in more significant inconsistencies than can be resolved through an appeals process,” Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said in a statement, apologizing for the “distress” the system had caused. “We now believe it is better to offer young people and parents certainty by moving to teacher-assessed grades.”

U.K. Exam Crisis Grows as Johnson Faces More Chaos This Week

It’s the second change of course in less than a week and comes days after Williamson insisted he wouldn’t back down. Johnson’s spokesman earlier said the prime minister had full confidence in his education secretary, but it’s just the latest virus-related episode that’s left the government struggling to cope. And for Williamson, there is another key test coming in two weeks: English schools are supposed to finally reopen after the pandemic lockdown.

The problem facing Williamson was that the coronavirus meant schoolchildren couldn’t sit their exams this year. Instead, the Department for Education asked exam regulator Ofqual to find a way of giving children the grades they would have got. But the algorithm it devised saw top students downgraded from the grades predicted by their teachers, and some children failed altogether if they go to a school that had poor results in the past.

To make matters worse, the structure of the algorithm meant it was less likely to hurt children in smaller classes, which benefited students at private schools.

Tory Pressure

A growing number of Conservative MPs, including two ministers, called for the government to change course. But the decision creates a fresh problem for universities, which had already accepted or rejected students based on the results published last week.

George Freeman, a Tory MP and former minister, told Times Radio the government’s handling of exam grading was a “total shambles” and suggested Williamson may lose his job if Johnson re-arranges his cabinet in the fall.

“This was obviously going to be an issue back in March, it was clear to anyone with any experience of schools or children that there was going to be a problem,” Freeman said. “Ultimately, the prime minister is in charge. And I think he will want to take firm control of this and get a grip and show that his government is taking the life chances of a generation of children seriously.”

Anger was immediate when the results for A-Level exams, which are sat at 18, were announced last week. At first, the focus was on the brightest students, many of whom found their teachers’ predictions of their results had been downgraded by a notch, meaning they missed out on places at the universities they wanted. By Monday, there was outrage at the way students at the other end of the spectrum were told they’d failed simply because Ofqual judged that some students at their school would typically do so.

‘Robust’

Johnson himself defended the system as “robust” and “dependable for employers” after 39% of results were downgraded by the algorithm. The prime minister was speaking after Williamson announced students would be able to appeal their results, though he didn’t give details about how it would work.

That concession was meant to avoid the backlash facing Scotland’s government over results announced using a similar system a week earlier. Williamson’s counterpart, John Swinney, apologized and said children would be graded on the basis of the grades their teachers had said they would get.

The problem for Johnson’s government, though, was they were still using an algorithm to attempt the impossible: Deciding what grades children would have got had they sat an exam they didn’t take.

But even relying on teacher predictions will not be trouble-free. The Runnymede Trust, an independent race and equality think tank, wrote to Williamson in April to express concern that Covid-19 could exacerbate an existing bias where high-achieving students from poorer backgrounds achieve better grades than their teachers predicted.

Not Alone

A 2016 study by University College London associate professor Gill Wyness, one of the letter’s signatories, found that the best students from low-income backgrounds are “significantly more likely” to achieve higher grades than predicted when compared with university applicants from high-income backgrounds.

Apart from Sweden, which kept schools running throughout the pandemic, there were disruptions in many major Europeans economies during crunch exam-taking season. But unlike the U.K., many went for the path of least resistance and avoided making front-page news as a debacle.

In Italy, the high-school leaving exam was simplified, written tests were replaced with a one-hour conversation with the student’s own teachers.

In France, students did not sit their “bac” for the first time since its inception under Napoleon and instead have received grades based on prior tests and homework. German states were split, but overall exams went ahead and some grade inflation was accepted — basically kids were marked up rather than down.

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