Debbie Hayton Debbie Hayton

Don’t blame teachers for this year’s grade inflation

(Photo: Getty)

Today’s A level results are unprecedented, but not unexpected. On Friday, Professor Alan Smithers  of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham said, ‘The early signs are that it will be another bumper year for grades.’ He went on to suggest that this might be, ‘justified as compensation for all the disruption suffered’.

The impact of Covid-19 on the education of children cannot be dismissed as mere disruption. While adults might now be returning to the office after 18 months working from home, children struggled through two terms of lockdown learning and two more cocooned in bubbles. Grades will be high but they have been earned. Teachers held it all together too. We developed online teaching programmes from a standing start and from our own homes.

We were there last summer when the government’s exam algorithm failed spectacularly. Nobody sat any A level exams last year, but school leavers were sent off to university with grades based on our professional judgement. It worked, though when we made those predictions we did not expect the government to just take our word for it. Governments inspect us, they monitor us and scrutinise us, but believe us? In normal years the rules prohibit us from invigilating exams in our own subjects, even when other invigilators are present.

Teachers did their job. But that did not involve predicting which students would have messed up

So this year when Gavin Williamson told MPs that the government would put their trust in teachers rather than algorithms, I worried that the real motivation was to pin the blame on teachers. But teachers rose again to the challenge, and we filed hundreds of thousands of Teacher Assessed Grades (and added TAGs to the list of acronyms in education) and millions more GCSE TAGs will be reported on Thursday.

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