Ofqual has made a major U-turn on A levels and GCSEs and announced that students who received downgraded A-level results last Thursday will now be awarded their original centre-assessed grades (CAGs).
The exam regulator also confirmed that students receiving GCSE results on Thursday will receive CAGs. However, the U-turn will not apply to BTEC results.
The decision comes after days of protests from students and calls for urgent action from sector leaders.
Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland have all confirmed that teacher-assessed grades will be awarded to students who received downgraded results.
News: U-turn will mean that A-level and GCSE teacher grades stand
BTEC results: Students told to contact Pearson about delayed results
Background: Call to give GCSE resit students their teacher grades
Ofqual chair Roger Taylor said: “After reflection, we have decided that the best way to do this is to award grades on the basis of what teachers submitted. The switch to centre-assessment grades will apply to both AS and A levels and to the GCSE results which students will receive later this week.
“There was no easy solution to the problem of awarding exam results when no exams have taken place. Ofqual was asked by the education secretary to develop a system for awarding calculated grades, which maintained standards and ensured that grades were awarded broadly in line with previous years. Our goal has always been to protect the trust that the public rightly has in educational qualifications.”
A-level and GCSE results: ‘Still many questions to be answered’
In response, UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “This U-turn is welcome, but we should never have got to this position. The political incompetence is unforgivable and there are still many questions to be answered.
“Staff facing unbearable workloads trying to deal with this fiasco have also faced needless cuts and threats of redundancy because of the uncertainty created by the government. It now needs to provide substantial financial support to the sector so that universities can protect all jobs, welcome students safely next term and continue to provide world-leading teaching and research.”
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said he supported the announcement and that it was particularly good news for GCSE resit students.
He said: “This is good for post-16 GCSE English and maths retake students whose prior achievements don’t give a good indication of their likely performance, as it means that the predictions of the teachers who know them best will stand.
“It is vital that information is provided speedily on how this decision will impact on higher education institutions, students wishing to apply through clearing and those who may have been rejected on their original grades.”
The cap on university places
Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons education select committee and Conservative MP for Harlow, said that at the beginning of July, the committee warned that there would be problems with Ofqual’s standardisation model and called for the exams regulator to “publish the model immediately to allow time for scrutiny”.
Speaking to Tes today, Mr Halfon, a former skills minister, said that “given the mess-up of the appeals process and the failure of the Ofqual model”, the U-turn was inevitable.
He said that we now needed urgent clarification about university places. He said: “We now need to reassure universities. Universities are bound by the offers they’ve made and now the cap on numbers will need to be lifted.”
Shortly afterwards, education secretary Gavin Williamson confirmed that the cap on university places would be lifted.
Mr Halfon also raised concerns about BTEC results being excluded from today’s U-turn. He said: “We have to make it very clear that BTECs are not the forgotten part of all of this and that the BTEC system is regarded as fair.”
The government ‘hasn’t fixed this mess yet’
NUS president Larissa Kennedy warned that “the government have not fixed this mess yet”.
She said: “This situation has merely unmasked a discriminatory system that it has been complicit in long before this year - one that underfunds our schools, colleges and universities meaning that, year on year, education has been a postcode lottery. Every year students have to contend with a university admissions system that establishes additional barriers to entry for already marginalised groups through the use of predicted grades.
“Over the past week, working-class students, students of colour and disabled students lost hard-fought-for university places. Many of those students affected have reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted by an assessment system that reproduces educational injustice, and the uncertainty this has produced.
“We will not forget this, nor will our efforts stop here. This simply isn’t good enough. We demand #JusticeForEducation in every postcode, every year. That means we need to overhaul our system of exams and grading, so that every student is given a fair chance to succeed and invest in education to end educational injustice once and for all.”
Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, said that leaders and teachers, students and parents, have “worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the injustices caused by the model, and today’s announcement is in large part down to their hard work”.
He said: “When it became clear that the government’s model was incapable of generating accurate A-level grades, honouring students’ centre-assessed grades was the best way to end the uncertainty and anxiety experienced by many students since Thursday morning.
“There is no perfect solution, and using centre-assessed grades will generate some problems of its own, but the situation we find ourselves in this evening is infinitely better than the situation at the start of today.
“Tomorrow, the hard work begins in making up the ground lost since Thursday. But tonight we are thankful that many thousands of students now have a far greater range of options available to them and can start to move on from what has been a very difficult period.”
