Gavin Williamson has performed a big U-turn today and announced that pupils in England receiving A level and GCSE results this year will be awarded their teacher-assessed grades, to avoid any student being downgraded by an algorithm.
In a statement this afternoon, the Education Secretary said:
‘We worked with Ofqual to construct the fairest possible model, but it is clear that the process of allocating grades has resulted in more significant inconsistencies than can be resolved through an appeals process’.
Williamson added that he is ‘sorry for the distress this has caused young people and their parents but hope this announcement will now provide the certainty and reassurance they deserve.’
That’s probably for the best, because the education secretary has not exactly been a bastion of certainty himself this past week. In fact before this U-turn today, Williamson had defended his decision to downgrade around 40 per cent of this year’s A level marks several times.
So to remind the education secretary of the value of consistency, Mr S has noted five times this week that Williamson defended the A levels results system and said he would not U-turn:
1
On Wednesday last week, as the outcry over Scottish exams continued, Williamson told broadcasters: ‘We have every confidence that the system we have put in place is a robust system, a system that is fair for the pupils.’
He added: ‘We think we have got the balance of the system absolutely right.’
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In the Telegraph the following day, as bereft students received their results, Williamson explained why simply awarding students with their teacher-assessed grades would be a terrible idea. He wrote:
‘we would have seen [grades] shoot up, which would devalue the results for the class of 2020, and would clearly not be fair on the classes of 2019 and 2021. But worse than that, it would mean that students this year would lose out twice over, both in their education and their future prospects.’
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The education secretary also appeared on This Morning on August 13, and again defended the A levels system. When Eamonn Holmes asked: ‘Just to give advanced warning on this, this is going to be the same system in place for next week as well?’
A steely-eyed Williamson replied: ‘That’s right, yes.’
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If he hadn’t dug a deep enough hole already, Williamson also headed over to Sky that morning, where he was asked by presenter Niall Paterson to guarantee that he ‘will not be forced into the embarrassing U-turn that John Swinney and Nicola Sturgeon were in Scotland’.
‘Absolutely,’ the education secretary promised. ‘This is the message that we got from everyone. This is the right approach to go forward.’
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Finally, in an interview for the Times this Saturday (a mere 48 hours before his U-turn) Williamson decided to hammer home one last time that he was not going to change the A level system.
‘This is it,’ Williamson told the paper. ‘No U-turns, no change’:
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