By Gavin Mackintosh-
Education unions in the Uk are calling for grade inflation for 2021, claiming that it would be “unconscionable” for this year’s exam results to be pegged to grades achieved in 2019, saying some grade inflation should again be allowed.
The unions want a system of comparable outcomes historically used by Ofqual to guarantee similar academic success rates in G.C.S.E and A level exams, to be applied to the 2021 exams series following this summer’s fiasco – which saw pupils awarded favourable centre assessment grades this year in the wake of the exams fiasco which led to better exam outcomes for pupils than initially feared.
The use of such a system has the inherent shortcoming of misrepresenting the true performance of British pupils, but unions believe it will help compensate for the academic loss suffered during school closures due to the pandemic.
In a letter to schools minister Nick Gibb, unions said comparable outcomes should be retained, stating that grade boundaries could be set using the usual comparable outcomes process as a starting point, and then altered by a number of marks to increase the percentage achieving that grade to an agreed level.
“That level could be somewhere between what was seen in 2019 and 2020,” the letter states.
The letter also recommends such a system to “retain a degree of comparability, taking into account “the disrupted learning students have experienced this year”. Implied in the recommendations are that academic standards are compromised to accommodate students have not been up and doing during the school closures when they were expected to continue studying privately through online resources.
It makes no reference to the possibility of pupils studying hard between now and next summer, to maximise their exam performance, but instead focuses on mitigating circumstances of the past and potential disruptions of the future.
Contingency Plans
The unions calls for other useful changes, such as contingency plans for pupils unable to take exams, giving pupils more choice over the questions they answer and priority testing for pupils in key exam years.
The joint proposals from the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), the NASUWT teachers’ union, the National Education Union (NEU), and the National Governance Association (NGA) has been considered deeply by the education bodies, but run the risk of attempting to fix grades to a level not supported by the ability of pupils.
The proposals were submitted to Gibb along with officials from the Department for Education and exams watchdog Ofqual, ahead of a meeting over exam plans today.
The Department Of Education and Ofqual have learnt from the mistakes of this year, and have plans in place to allow affected pupils to sit a single exam paper later in the year.
The paper reported the Plan C would be to use teachers’ predictions of pupils’ performance, but this would only come into effect if exams could not be staged next year.
The unions also want contingency plans to involve schools running “formal staged assessments”, undertaken by pupils under exam conditions.
Consistency
The letter states: “In order to ensure consistency across schools and colleges, the exam boards could either develop these staged assessments themselves, or signpost centres to acceptable pre-existing assessments that could be used for this purpose”.
An Ofqual spokesperson told The Eye Of Media.Com:
“Exams are important. Students, now in their second year of study for these qualifications, need a chance to show what they can do. We’re working with government and exam boards on the basis that exams run next summer with contingency arrangements in place.
Students will have missed out on some teaching and learning – but we can take the truly exceptional circumstances of this academic year into account as we set standards. Any decisions to make further reductions in subject content for GCSEs and A levels would be taken by Ministers.”