Senior figures from both the Department for Education and Ofqual faced MPs’ questions today about their handling of exam grading this year and into the future.
Schools minister Nick Gibb; Ofqual’s interim chief regulator, Simon Lebus; the watchdog’s chair, Ian Bauckham; and the Department for Education’s permanent secretary, Susan Acland-Hood, gave evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee this morning.
Here are five key points from today’s session on exams.
Ofqual: Exam grading plans to be announced next month
GCSEs 2022: Heads expect a plan B to be announced soon
Covid: Lack of plan on GCSEs was ‘unforgivable’
1. Grading decisions for GCSE and A-level exams in 2022 will be made next month
Final plans for how GCSE and A-level exams will be graded in 2022 will be revealed next month.
Conservative MP David Johnston asked Ofqual officials: “When can we expect your decision on what’s going to happen in 2022? I think you said shortly.”
Mr Bauckham said this would be coming in October.
2. Exam adaptations for this year will be decided on in the next two weeks
Ofqual later clarified that Mr Bauckham had been referring to the decision over how grading would be carried out in 2022.
The regulator said that plans for the adaptations that will be made for exams next summer - to take account of the disruption Covid has caused to students’ education - will be decided in the next two weeks.
3. Ofqual and the DfE will consult on a plan B in the event of exams not going ahead for a third year in a row
The government and Ofqual will set out their contingency plan this autumn in case the “unthinkable” happens and exams have to be cancelled again in 2022, MPs were told
Mr Bauckham revealed that work was “quite advanced” on a possible plan in the event that GCSE and A-level exams cannot go ahead for the third year in a row due to the pandemic.
Tes revealed last month that school leaders were expecting alternative arrangements to be announced soon in the event of exams having to be cancelled because of Covid.
Mr Gibb said: “We don’t want to cancel exams. We do know that teachers and the school sector do want details of the contingency because they want to know what data they might or might not need to collect should the worst happen and we end up having to cancel exams.”
4. Grade appeal numbers are in line with last year
Mr Lebus said that the number of appeals about 2021 grades were in the “thousands but not tens of thousands.”
He added: “It’s very much in line with last year, which I think was around 5,000.”
There had been major concern among school teachers and headteachers about the number of appeals that could result from the teacher-assessed grades process this year.
5. Some employers want to get back to 2019 grading standards sooner rather than later
MPs were told that Ofqual had met with employers this week to discuss the issue of future exams grading.
Mr Bauckham said employers’ representatives “held a range of views” on how this should happen.
He added: “There was certainly one view that spoke of the advantages of getting back to 2019 grading standards sooner rather than later.
“There were other views that said, depending on the way in which the pandemic pans out, it might be that a staged return to 2019 standards would be a better approach.”
