Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why the exams debacle was so predictable – and predicted

Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images

Bit late now, isn’t it, to complain about the exams debacle? Where were they, Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, the teaching unions, Nicola Sturgeon and the BBC on 18 March when Gavin Williamson fatally decided to scrap this year’s A-levels and GCSEs? If they were throwing their rattles out of the pram, it wasn’t loud enough to be heard. 

The grounds for that idiot move was ‘to give, pupils, parents and teachers certainty, and enable schools and colleges to focus on supporting vulnerable children and the children of critical workers’. That, you note, was before the start of lockdown. Yet if ever there was a problem that could be seen a mile off, it was the consequences of this disastrous decision. It is an unlovely trait to say I told you so… but I told you so, here. Cancelling exams was guaranteed to cause problems out of all proportion to the supposed benefits. As we now find.

The fuss is happening now, but any idiot could have seen this coming

Examinations could have been held if there had been the political will to do so. But it would have required the Education Secretary to have reversed his decision by mid-April at the latest to give schools and exam boards time to prepare. It would probably have required the exams to have been postponed a little, until July, to allow for unique circumstances, with results a little later than normal. It would, crucially, have required teachers actually to teach pupils from two year groups for three months as opposed to not teaching them at all. 

My son will be getting his GCSE results on Thursday – until there’s a U-turn on that too; give it time – and he has had just two, possibly three actual lessons since the start of lockdown. In physics. And his school is rated outstanding.

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