Today’s GSCE results show essentially unchanged performance compared with last year, with 21.7 per cent of pupils achieving grade 7 or above (compared with 21.6 per cent in 2023) and 67.4 per cent achieving grade 4 or above (compared with 67.8 per cent last year). This is still slightly up on 2019, but the Covid bounce in grades which occurred in 2020 and 2021, when exams were not actually sat and pupils were awarded grades based on teachers’ predictions instead, seems to be over. In 2020, 75.9 per cent of candidates achieved grade 4 and above, rising even further to 76.9 per cent in 2021. The pandemic effect lasted into 2022, when 73.7 per cent achieved grade 4 or above, but had been all but eliminated by last year.
But that still leaves a cohort of students – many of whom are now at university – who look on paper to be particularly able and intelligent but whose inflated grades conceal a truth: they missed a vital part of their education. The inflated grades of the pandemic years are a testament to over-optimistic expectations of teachers (which is perhaps understandable – as who wouldn’t want to talk up the prospects of kids they are teaching?), but they also speak of one of the lesser-mentioned scandals of the pandemic. Children were cheated of an education by having schools closed for weeks on end, without a proper mechanism in place to ensure that teaching could continue remotely. But instead of addressing the failure, those same children were awarded flattering grades. It is rather as if the government had responded to the (equally scandalous) failure to ensure that people with cancer symptoms present themselves for examination by artificially inflating the numbers of people being given the all-clear.
Today’s GCSE results also contain a warning for the government, as it seeks to impose the national curriculum on academies and free schools. Once again, those schools had stronger results than comprehensive schools under local authority control. In academies, 21.2 per cent of pupils achieved grade 7. In free schools it was 21.6 per cent. In ordinary comprehensives it was 19.4 per cent. The government is adopting a typically Labour attitude towards schools: it doesn’t like the idea of schools having any kind of independence. It wants them more regulated and under the control of state commissars. But there will be a price to pay for this. Academies are popular and have been a success. Trying to take away that independence is going to turn them back to being more like the failing comprehensives they replaced.
Another stark outcome is that girls are performing better than boys at the very highest level. Of pupils who achieved all grade 9s in their GCSEs, 65 per cent were girls and 35 per cent boys. There is a growing gulf between the numbers of female and male students studying for degrees. That looks almost certain to continue over the next few years as girls will have better exam results to present to university admissions departments.
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