How thousands of students will be hit by government-imposed ‘grade deflation’

Good morning. I’m Aamna Mohdin, the Guardian’s community affairs correspondent, and I’ll be helming the newsletter for the rest of the week.

Hundreds of thousands of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will receive the results of their A-level, BTec and other exams on Thursday. For some, it’ll be a moment of jubilation, as they get to go to their dream university or other higher education institutions. For many others, however – and perhaps more than usual – heartbreak awaits.

Grades are expected to fall again this year in England after a push by government ministers to return results back to pre-pandemic levels, and move away from a period when teacher-assessed grades replaced exams, leading to higher marks.. This so-called course correction, or grade deflation, will probably hit disadvantaged students the hardest, with some experts describing the government’s decision to impose pre-pandemic grading in England as premature. Up to 50,000 students taking A-levels this summer will miss out on A* or A grades that they would have received last year, according to some forecasters.

For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Richard Adams, the Guardian’s education editor, on the rationale behind this decision and the impact it will have on students. That’s after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘You’re going to see substantially lower numbers of As and A*s than last year’

Cast your mind back to 2020, it’s the beginning of the pandemic, and thousands of students had their GCSE and A-level exams cancelled. The government initially tried an algorithm to determine student grades, but that quickly proved to be a disaster and it was scrapped. Instead, teacher-assessed grades were used in 2020 and 2021.

As teachers weren’t able to use a national referencing system, Richard tells me, grades were awarded more generously, and now it’s time to row back: “The government decided that it was good for the credibility of A-levels and GCSEs in general that grades should return to the proportion awarded before the pandemic, so going back to 2019.”

Last year, the government announced it will do this in a two step process: the 2022 grades would sit halfway between those awarded during the pandemic and the pre pandemic baseline, and this year in 2023, grades would return to how they were awarded prior to the pandemic.

But how were grades awarded prior to the pandemic? The exam regulator used something called cohort referencing. “In the case of A-levels, they look at the grades that were achieved by students at GCSEs, in the case of GCSE, they’re looking at the attainment achieved by the same year group in key stage 2 national sets. They use those to determine their level of grades that will be awarded as a proportion of grades nationally,” Richard says.

He explained that cohort referencing isn’t about what scores students got individually in those previous tests, but about the national profile. It’s a way for the exam regulator to see if this year’s group of students, compared to previous years, has a better or worse prior attainment.

It’s this system that students will be facing this year, but with an added complication. “The usual reference point is how these students performed in GCSEs and Btecs, but those were awarded by teacher assessments,” Richard says. “You’re going to see substantially lower numbers of As and A*s, and seven, eights and nines in GCSEs, than we’ve seen in 2020, 2021, and compared to last year.”

Who will be marked down?

But will the return to the old system have a different impact on different groups of students? Richard thinks it will, and points to stark warnings by experts who believe disadvantaged students will bear the brunt of grade deflation. “Generally speaking, the effects of changes to the examination and curriculum structure in England tends to be magnified among disadvantaged students because they’re the ones who typically struggle the most,” Richard says. “In the case of disadvantaged students this year, they haven’t had access to some of the resources that have been provided by the government to help students catch up.”

According to a report released last year, the national tutoring programme, which the government released in response to the closure of schools during the pandemic, was failing to help the children who need it most.

And why?

Among the rationale behind returning to the cohort referencing system is a fear that some students are going to university unprepared for the academic rigour of their course and dropping out. But Richard warns there’s very little evidence to suggest that this is the case.

“The biggest effect on students dropping out that we’re aware of is things like cost of living, and what we’ve seen in the last year is a massive increase in the cost of living. The dropout rates some have referred to go back several years and include students who took their A-levels before the pandemic,” Richard says.

In fact, we don’t really know what the dropout rates for last year are because this university year hasn’t started yet.

Richard adds: “Students who went through the pandemic when schools were closed lost out on lots of opportunities, not just educational opportunities, but life opportunities in general. If the dropout rate is higher, the way that A-levels were assessed isn’t necessarily going to have much influence on it.”

What happens now

It’s worth emphasising that the issue of grade deflation will affect students in England more, as Scotland and Wales have taken a different approach.

“Wales for example, have said that because of the impact of the pandemic, it’s too soon to go back to pre-pandemic grade levels so they’re going to have another step down and it’ll be next year when they go back,” Richard says. “This makes sense for many as next year, the kids taking A-levels will be the kids who sat GCSEs last year, so would have had a relatively normal experience, at least to their A-level.”

Even if some argue the English system is fairer, it’s hard not to feel for this year’s A-level students. “It’s fair in the sense that it’s being applied to everyone, but the suggestion is that it’s unfair because there are some groups of students who suffered more as a result of the pandemic than others. I think you could make a case that kids who had their GCSE awarded two years ago were right in the middle of the unfairness and that, as the Social Mobility Foundation says, it’s therefore premature to pretend that there are no effects now and go straight back to pre-pandemic gradings.”

Don’t expect the true impact of this return to pre-pandemic gradings to be revealed on Thursday, Richard adds, it could take several months before we actually get the full datasets. And by then thousands of teenagers will have celebrated and commiserated results that are supposed to set them up for life.

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