The golden age of GCSE English resits might be drawing to a close.

I may be the only person to ever call it that. But the policy has resulted in real achievements.

Learners have got used to the idea of resits and don’t kick against the mandatory enrolment anything like they did three or four years ago.

Most surprising, perhaps, has been the progress made by those whose attainment was the lowest at the end of Year 11. National data shows that they have been more likely to improve their GCSE grades post-16 than the grade 3/D-grade students the policy intended to push across the line.

And yet the Department for Education has now made a minor change to the policy, selling out those whom it was serving best. The change to the conditions of funding, announced last week, allows those with lower prior attainment of grade 2 or below to stop studying English once they have achieved functional skills level 2. The aspiration to improve their GCSE grade has fallen away.

Students with lower GCSE attainment at school are more likely to be from lower-income households, and recent studies have shown the long-term economic disadvantage of not attaining the grade 4/C grade in English. This is overtly a move against social mobility.

Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity SHINE