Teachers vow to fight inquiry results

Schools plan to flood the exam boards with requests for A-level re-marking, claiming they have been betrayed by the regrading inquiry.

Thousands of students and teachers who hoped for better grades have been disappointed. The A-level results of just 168 students improved enough for them to qualify for their first-choice university.

The three exam boards reviewed more than 300,000 entries in 31 subjects. But grade boundaries in only 18 OCR units were revised. A total of 9,800 candidate entries had unit grades changed. Overall grades rose for 1,945 students.

At King Edward VI School in Handsworth, Birmingham, 19 top French students who received low oral results had no grade changes. Head Elspeth Insch said: “These results mean every one of these girls fell back during the A2 year. Teachers are the harshest judges of all on standards. Teachers and students deserve to be decently rewarded. I will fight to the death on this.”

Dr Davina Lloyd, head of the Coopers’ Company and Coborn School in Essex, said: “This has been a big paperchase. It is a face-saving exercise so that exam boards can say, ‘See, we did nothing wrong.’ But something has gone very wrong.”

Exam boards are now bracing themselves for a deluge of re-mark enquiries.