The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the cancellation of all public examinations in 2020. One teacher tells me of how instructions from Ofqual mean she is under pressure to distort results and abandon her professional judgment.
Charlotte is angry.
She is Head of Music at a large London comprehensive school with a decade of experience, but the Covid-19 pandemic has presented her with a completely new set of challenges. Like all schools, hers has to co-ordinate the delivery of a complex curriculum online. Music is one of those subjects where parental support can be lacking, and chalk, talk and textbook methods are often ineffective. But teachers across the country have risen to the task, Charlotte included.
It is Ofqual that has brought out emotions she would usually reserve for special occasions.
When schools were closed and exams cancelled, teachers were asked to submit calculated grades, described by Ofqual as ‘an evidence-based, professional judgement of the grade each learner would have been most likely to receive if they had been able to complete their qualification’. Teachers were also asked to rank the students in order, useful if the distribution of grades had to be adjusted.
In May, Ofqual issued some clarification about the process. Rather than looking at a whole-school level, individual subjects would now be standardised against historical data, with grades judged too generous likely to be moved down. An understandable attempt to prevent overly optimistic grade inflation does not sit well with Charlotte.
“In Music we have so few kids that the historical data are meaningless,” she told me.
The number of A level students studying Music at Charlotte’s school has varied markedly in the last three years, from thirteen in 2017, to two the following year, and four last summer. Such small cohorts are prone to wild changes in average grades, as so much depends on the individuals and their circumstances.
“In 2018 we had two students, and Music was a weak subject for them,” she says. “This year we have five and they’re all going on to study Music at university next year. We’ve even got our first A* student, and it is the first year we have had three expert and experienced teachers.”
Where a student’s average GCSE result generates A level target grades, their weaker subjects are likely to show less progress – ‘value-added’ – compared to the stronger ones. Charlotte has been told that when the grades are in, the value-added measure for the class should not be significantly above the three-year average. This would be around 0, but she has a stellar group and has predicted that they will exceed this by some distance.
“We had gone through a really robust statistics-based process, using common sense and our professional judgment,” she says. “Now all the contextual information is being disregarded and we are not even submitting any evidence.”
She spent some time considering how to make the results fit Ofqual’s expectations. Should she simply drop every grade, or select individuals for whom the effect would be least severe to suffer bigger changes?
“With two students predicted As, I thought one needed the grade to get into university whilst the other didn’t, so that was the grade to drop,” she explains.
And with the GCSE group she started considering whether the student was continuing to A-level and how the grade they received would affect their confidence. All because, according to Ofqual, something must give.
“It all just felt totally wrong,” she says.
The extraordinary changes that the pandemic has enforced upon all of us are clear almost everywhere we look. ‘Unprecedented’ might become the most used word of 2020, and the government, Ofqual and school leaders had to put in place a system that, perhaps inevitably, would have its problems. And they had to guard against the annual problem of inaccurate predicted grades translating into a year of highly-questionable results.
To Charlotte, it feels like a blunt instrument designed in the image of large subjects that does not suit the nuances of smaller ones in the arts. It could be that the students in her class are the victims, and to her it does not feel necessary.
In the end, Charlotte has decided to submit the grades as she sees them: a course of action that risks the entire cohort having their results pulled down. If that happens, she has the full support of the school who will fight on her behalf.
“At least I will be able to sleep at night knowing I was honest.”
n.b. names changed to protect confidentiality