What is wrong with the A-level results this year?

Earlier in March this year, the quickly spreading virus that we now know as the coronavirus became even more visible in Europe and eventually the UK. This left the UK government with no choice but to shut down schools on a national level. The UK was not first to close our schools and was certainly not the last. By March 27th this year, 1.5 billion children around the world had been affected by school / university / other forms of education closures.

This meant that children had to resort to other forms of education such as virtual learning , home - schooling or even no education at all.  However for two year groups in secondary schools around the UK , this would have an impact on their education more than any other year group. School closures meant that year 11's would not be able to sit their GCSEs and that year 13's would not be able to sit their A-level exams. For year 13's who had opted to continue on to further education, the effects of the virus on their A-levels would have a detrimental impact on already complicated things like their university offers and therefore the paths of their futures. With nothing else to do except wait and see the outcome, teens were left with no option other than to trust in our government. 

Results day for A-level students fell just a few days ago on the 13th August. After seeing what had happened in Scotland, many students had been worrying about how England was to manage our situation. Unfortunately, these students were right to worry , just as they have a right to be disappointed in how the government had managed this situation. Roughly 40% of students had been downgraded meaning that many even had university offers withdrawn from them. There are several stories of intelligent teens who have found themselves losing offers from medical schools, and other top choices for education like Oxford and Cambridge University. As well as this, several other universities seemed to have withdrawn offers too. However , although we can all see that this algorithm did not work, what was also obvious is that some people were affected more than others and this is where a whole other issue comes creeping in.

The government released this paragraph on how grades were to be calculated:

Your school or college will be asked to send exam boards two pieces of information for each of your subjects, based on what they know about your work and achievements:

• the grade they believe you were most likely to get if teaching, learning and exams had happened as planned
• within each subject, the order of students at your school or college, by performance, for each grade; this information will be used to standardise judgements – allowing fine tuning of the standard applied across schools and colleges

Your school or college will consider a range of things like your classwork and homework, your results in assignments and any mock exams, any non-exam assessment or coursework you might have done, and your general progress during your course.

This information will allow us, with exam boards, to standardise grades across schools and colleges, to make sure that, as far as possible, results are fair and that students are not advantaged or disadvantaged because their schools or colleges are more generous or harsh than others when making those judgements. That means the final grade you get could be different from the one your school or college sends to the exam board.

Although it may look like a decent way to grade students at first sight, the government's 'algorithm' meant that students who attend state schools and those who live in working class areas (so therefore several minority backgrounds) were way more likely to be affected than their private school, higher class/more well - off counterparts. From the roughly 40% of downgraded results, 10.4% were in the most deprived areas of the country meanwhile 9.5% were in medium disadvantaged areas and 8.3% were in areas with the least deprivation nationally. Private schools had 48.6% of their results at A* - A grades whilst we saw that state schools only had 21.8% of the same grades. As well as this, white students were 8% more likely to get A* - A grades ( 25.5% of white students saw their grades in this range compared to 17.7% of black students).

Ofqual itself admitted that their algorithm had been designed in a way that would heavily affect underprivileged areas. They stated that ' students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to awarded lower grades than predicted ' and so that is exactly what happened. 

Now that the damage had already been done, what can we do about it ?

Well, there have been some protests happening around England but not at a high rate. There has also been calls for the secretary of state for education , Gavin Williamson, to resign on the basis that this situation has caused a lot of chaos for those who just got back their results.

I have also got 5 petitions that you can sign ( which you can find on this article's Instagram post ) but what is also very important is that you educate yourself on what has happened and why it did.

I hope this article has given you some insight into what is going on and just how unfair it really is. I also hope I am not back here writing again about how the government had managed to fail our y11's in the same way. Although it is likely that more GCSE students will be more affected as it is said that this already controversial algorithm that has disrupted the futures of many will be applied to as many as 97% of GCSE students, this is up 58% from those affected by the A-level results and how they were graded (39 %) meaning that the outcry could be even worse next week.

Update!!

As of the 17th August 2020, the government has decided to change how grades for both GCSE's and A-level's will be given to students. Grades will be given based off the teachers predicted grades. Although this has caused some confusion from different aspects included places at university for A-level students, it has also brought peace to many people and overall, it good that this has happened.