The temperature’s been rising rapidly, as this remarkable summer drags on. It feels as if we’re living in a pressure cooker. As the heat reaches its climax, thunder is forecast… 

And, meanwhile, the incendiary debate that’s rumbled on over the past few months has broken in a storm of criticism.

The usual commentators have had their input about teachers submitting “optimistic” grades, and there have been frequent suggestions of (unconscious) bias. Sometimes it surprises me that teachers who supposedly can’t offer an accurate assessment of our students’ abilities were ever let loose in a classroom at all.

I don’t mean to suggest that debate in education isn’t important. But this hasn’t been a genuine debate - and it has been particularly destructive. 

Devalued A-level achievements

Teachers may be used to criticism, and examiners may be glad they’re not getting it in the neck this year - a small compensation for loss of earnings. But no one seems to have had any thought for the students whose achievements will, by extension, have been so devalued if the wider - supposedly wiser - community is intent upon holding the final grades in such low esteem.

Teachers will remember how devastated students were in March, when their exams were cancelled, and how hard it was for them to pick themselves up after the seismic shock of seeing their purpose disappear into a vacuum.

It’s totally unprecedented, of course. We’ve never had an exam season like it…apart from last year and the year before and the one before that...

When O levels disappeared, the supposed gold standard was lost, and criteria-based GCSEs ushered in a new age of “grade inflation” - so said traditionalists. Years (and many specification changes) later, order was supposedly restored with the most recently “reformed” specifications…which no one particularly likes, because assessment objectives too rigidly applied drain learning of all its joy.

Nervous guinea pigs

How did exam candidates feel about each successive innovation? Often they have been depicted as nervous guinea pigs, and they must often have felt it. What would the new currency of 9-1 be like? And how would a C grade fit in relation to levels 4 and 5? 

It’s all too easy to look back at even last year’s assessment landscape through rose-tinted spectacles. Have we forgotten the efforts Ofqual had to make to ensure that the proportion of candidates awarded the new grades were in line with the old?

And have we forgotten the controversy that rages annually around exam marking - the reliability and consistency of it? How different are the preoccupations of the influential voices this year?

The dead hand of key stage 2 data applied to cohorts, alongside the centre’s history of grades, root this year’s grades firmly in the past, which means that all the unfairnesses are not a new aspect of this year’s arrangements. They have existed for more than three years. The debate has opened our eyes to the problems of the past. 

Tarnished grades

In future, we need to make more strenuous efforts to ensure social equality. But is it fair to inflict the political debate, no matter how valid, on to the sense of achievement of this 2020 cohort?

It matters very much that A-level students get the places that their work over the two-year course merits. Fortunately, universities have shown themselves willing to negotiate more than they might have done in the past. Last year’s students who didn’t get the grades had not quite the same treatment, even if they were the victims of inaccurate marking.

Sadly, many students will feel that their grades are more the product of the standardisation process run by the boards than their own merits.

And, just in case the critics haven’t had enough to fill the cyberspace, we had the 11th- hour change, allowing the use of a mock exam grade in appeal if it is higher than the grade published. 

This move fails resoundingly to quieten dissenting voices. Now the merits of mock exams - their validity, reliability and transferability - have come under scrutiny. Until this year, mocks served the purpose of a much-needed wake-up call for those not working hard enough, or a further stage in the flight path to success for the conscientious. Mocks were a diagnostic tool, never intended for the public domain. 

Setting the record straight

So I think that we need to set the record straight. On results day, as I looked at my students, suitably socially distanced, collecting their results, I remembered the peaks and troughs of the past two years, as they progressed through the content and honed their skills.

The echoes of the individual contributions that lit up class discussion, the focused group tasks and sophisticated questioning approaches that they developed when tackling unseen poems cold will remain long after the well-spaced queues for results slips have gone.

I won’t forget either their good-natured tolerance of books they didn’t necessarily like but could intellectually appreciate, the essays that showed sparkle, the ones that were good in parts and demonstrated nuggets of learning. 

And I will always remember the assignment by students who suddenly found a passion for a text and wanted to just keep on writing as they made significant realisations they would never have made without the task.

Grades have never been an adequate summation of all that has been achieved, just as exams are so unsatisfactory when the questions test only a small part of what has been learned on the course.

So let the calibrators measure, let the statisticians impose their grids on our grades, and the politicians intone and opine to their hearts’ content.

This year, I’m celebrating the holistic learning that goes well beyond whatever form of testing we use to help our students progress to the next phase. They can’t take that away from me, or from the students. 

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama in a secondary school in the South of England. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)