After a tough year for GCSE and A Level students and the debate centred around how we assess students’ grades, we talk to Chris Townsend, Headmaster of Felsted School, Essex, to find out whether exam success effects future success
Friday 18 June was the deadline for schools across England to enter their GCSE and A Level grades. It has been a very challenging time for teachers, and students, and it remains to be seen whether this year will provide fairer outcomes than last year, when the algorithm took the blame. The truth is that the system created last year was hugely flawed and an algorithm only does what it is set up to do. I think that I said last year that it was a system designed to be fair statistically, but unfair individually, and the weight of stories of individuals who had clearly been disadvantaged with little exam success overwhelmed the media, and resulted in a rapid collapse of the planned system, as we reverted to ‘Centre Assessed Grades’. This year we have had so-called ‘Teacher Assessed Grades’ – a very unfair label, as all grades that have been put forward are not simply calculated by the class teacher, but have been moderated in departments, and then quality assured by schools, so we have favoured the term ‘School Assessed Grades’. The key difference this year is that these have to be evidence based grades, so students have been busy doing multiple assessments to provide the evidence for their grade; last...