The students who this week collected their A-level results overcame a formidable set of challenges. The class of 2023 were plunged into their first formal examinations only this summer, having been awarded their GCSEs by teacher assessment due to the pandemic. They belong to a cohort that is still emerging from the huge social and psychological disruptions caused by the Covid years, as schools only gradually return to an even keel.
Those who made the grades they hoped for, and those who did the same in T-levels and BTecs, are therefore entitled to consider that an exceptional achievement. Those who did not were extremely unlucky to find themselves at the wrong end of highly unusual circumstances. The government’s decision to reimpose pre-pandemic grading in England on this year group – an example not followed in Wales or Northern Ireland – was premature. As expected, the consequence was the biggest-ever decline in results, with the proportion of A* and A grades falling from 35.9% to 26.5%. At the other end of the scale, there was a sharp increase in the number of low grades awarded, compared with 2019.
This was unnecessary disappointment forced upon pupils whose school experience was quite clearly shaped by the pandemic era. To claim, as Gillian Keegan did on Thursday, that employers won’t care about a job applicant’s grades “in 10 years’ time” is a truly bizarre point for an education secretary to make. Exams taken when still a teenager should never have a sense of make-or-break attached to them. But good grades build self-esteem and a sense that hard work is rewarded, and for better or worse, results day tends to lodge in the memory. A return to pre-pandemic norms should have waited until the last group whose formal exam history was affected by Covid had passed through the system.
More broadly, the government’s desire to draw a line under Covid considerations risks entrenching existing inequalities. A recent survey by the Social Mobility Foundation found that catch-up tutoring provision for disadvantaged and low-income students failed to match that accessed by their better-off peers. Thursday’s results and university acceptance figures duly confirmed a gulf that has been widening since 2019 between the most and least deprived pupils, and between independent schools and state schools. A parallel achievement gap between poorer regions and London and the south-east underlines the need for far greater educational investment in those areas and communities where the wider consequences of the pandemic hit hardest.
For school-leavers whose results confirmed a place at their chosen university – and for those who successfully navigate what will be a highly competitive clearing process – the next few weeks will be full of excitement and anticipation. Having made it through such a disrupted school experience, they deserve something better once they get to campus. But here too, the government needs to get its act together. The capped tuition-fee funding model for universities in England is not working: institutions are cash-strapped, lecturers are striking over pay and poorer students are burdened by too much debt.
Rishi Sunak and Ms Keegan might wish that the clock could be turned back to 2019. But following the pandemic and pressures related to the cost of living crisis, England’s universities, like its schools, need a new deal. So do the 18-year-olds heading in their direction this autumn.
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