Portrait of the week: A-level chaos, quarantine confusion and revolution

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The government seemed to be taken strangely unaware by the frenzy of recrimination that came its way when results were announced from a system put in place as a substitute for A-levels, cancelled in March. Schools had been told to present teachers’ assessments, to which Ofqual applied an algorithm supposed to iron out anomalies. Almost 40 per cent of teachers’ assessments were downgraded, but even so the proportion of A and A* grades was higher than ever. Yet anomalies abounded, and schools that had performed less well in recent years saw bright pupils penalised; black children and those from poor backgrounds were said to be hard hit. While candidates lamented lost places at medical school, the government did nothing. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, packed for a holiday in Scotland. At last, Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education, posed for the cameras with his resolute coffee mug and announced that teachers’ assessments would be accepted after all, which threw universities and candidates into new spasms of uncertainty. ‘My focus is making sure youngsters get the grades that they deserve,’ he said when invited to resign.

Travellers from France, Holland, Monaco, Malta, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Aruba in the Leeward Antilles were obliged at two days’ notice to go into quarantine; there had been a rush for the Channel Tunnel and ferries before the deadline of 4 a.m. on 15 August. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 16 August, total UK deaths from Covid-19 stood at 41,361. This was fewer than a week earlier, when the total was 46,566, because the criterion for judging a death to be attributable to coronavirus had changed. Deaths in England no longer counted if they took place more than 28 days after a first positive laboratory-confirmed test.