GCSE, IGCSE and A Level Results are set to be announced this month (August) and if there is one certainty that will follow it is that lives are set to be changed. Throughout British Exams Week, SchoolsCompared.com will be reporting on the results with one single aim: to celebrate the achievements of students, teachers, leaders, our school regulators and all our schools.
- A Level and Level 3 BTEC Results Day will take place on Thursday 17 August 2023
- I/GCSE and BTEC Level 2 Results Day will take place on Thursday 24 August 2023
Getting Perspective
Celebration and positivity is not what you we usually find from journalists covering Results Days. In fact, it is true of any story. Human beings seem to need some edge to create stories worth reading.
The truth is that bad news sells and every year you’ll find no end of stories latched onto negativity and creating friction – generally from those set, in this context, on comparing the results of schools, or finding problems, imaginary or otherwise…..
Often it is hard to even tell who the bad guys are. It does not seem to matter as long as some straw man can be set up somewhere to knock down. It’s usually the schools, the Exam Boards or the government, someone, anyone, somewhere, anywhere…. it seems headlines need drama.
But it is students that pay the price for shock-filled headlines. And we think this approach is wrong on days we report on exam results..
We believe, on SchoolsCompared.com, that the days when students get their results should not be days that call into question their achievement, pile on the pressure or in any way knock them down. Too much is at stake.
Exams measure a point in time. That is all.
But the results, however, often have impacts way beyond this – and we should recognise this.
- In the case of I/GCSEs, and Level 2 BTEC examinations, they can be used by schools to decide whether students can proceed to study for their chosen qualification and subjects pathways at Sixth Form.
- In the case of A Levels they decide whether students have met the grades required by their chosen university or employer.
- For BTEC students it is slightly different, as grades are cumulative and coursework plays a major part – but even so, the cliff edge is often with Distinctions and Distinction *s that are no easy feat to meet.
Like it, or not, the system is built on judgements, cliff edges, grade boundaries and cut-offs.
The Covid Years Background 2020 – 2022
The last few years have thrown all examination systems into some degree of chaos.
Last year, in 2022, results grading was designed “to be the most generous on record,” despite the return to formal examinations. Exam Boards were instructed to more than generously grade all exams to reflect the impacts of Covid, although, as we have seen, everyone knew that there would be a drop from the heights of Teacher-assessed grades in 2021 and 2022. By 2021 around four times the number of students received all grade 9s in their GCSEs. The number of top grades awarded at A Level doubled. In 2022 results dropped back, but were still considerably higher than in 2019. This is captured in a snapshot of data at A Level from EDSTATICA.com:
2023 Back to 2019
Will 2023 see a return to the standards, and expectations, of 2019?
The UK government’s Department of Education says the following:
“This year will see a return to pre-pandemic grading arrangements, with protections in place for GCSEs, AS and A levels against the impact of disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Senior examiners will set ground boundaries to make sure that overall national results are similar to those of 2019.
“Broadly speaking, this means that a student will be just as likely to achieve a particular grade this year as they would have been before the pandemic.”
Explaining these “protections” the Department of Education continues:
“To acknowledge that students may still have experienced some disruption they will continue to be supported in GCSE maths, physics and combined science with formulae and equation sheets during exams.
“There will also be protection for students taking GCSEs, AS levels and A levels when it comes to grading.”
In practice this means:
- GCSE, AS level and A level exam timetables have been designed to better space out exam papers in the same subject to give students more time to revise between papers than before the pandemic
- An allowance for disruption will be made so that overall results will be similar to those of 2019.
Essentially:
- If results fall short of overall achievements in 2019, students will be pulled up to the 2019 thresholds.
- If results fall high of overall achievements in 2019, students will be pulled down to the 2019 thresholds.
This means that we can expect 2023, by 2020 – 2022 standards, to be harsh on students and, at least relatively, will be something of a culture shock.
I/GCSE – A Different Way
Our view on I/GCSEs has consistently been to question why they even still exist. In our view they are a complete anachronism and should be abolished. They were designed for a time when the majority of children left school at 16 and required a qualification for employers. Today’s world could not be more different. The British system is designed for children to stay within education of some sort until the age of 18. No other educational system imposes these examinations. at 16, although, on paper, in the IB system, formal examinations for the MYP are available as an option.
We think that GCSE should be replaced by a much lower stakes internal assessment. Except for some old school anachronisms in education, those who are driven by some strange need to impose suffering on children to make them more resilient – and usually just the sort who believe that “exams were much harder in our day and children have it so easy these days”, most educators tend to agree.
Today that is why, in practice, good schools tend to treat GCSEs as a guide, not a rule book. They know their students. If a student has a bad day, no good school is going to stop a student proceeding to their chosen Sixth Form course of study because they have missed a threshold. Few employers or universities will ever even ask about them, except to ensure the existence of a Grade C pass in English and Mathematics.
A Level and BTEC Results – The Stakes Remain High but Future’s Bright
With A Levels and BTECs it is a different story. This is particularly true for competitive places in Degree Apprenticeships at Blue Chips, and for those degrees that have limited places, and at Russel Group Universities. Medicine is the obvious one. Costing the UK government around £150,000 per student, students face a ridiculously small number of opportunities in the UK – competition is concomitantly fierce and disappointment inevitable.
More positively, in other subjects – and certainly in non Labs based subjects, students set on a university education in the UK at al least, should be able to source a degree course if all goes wrong, even if at a different university, through clearing. 2023, in fact, may be the last of the good years for student choice. The current UK government has been watching too many old BT advertisements about “ologies” and decided that it wants to cut courses that do not lead to highly paid employment in a move less driven by the need to improve education than cut costs. It has also decided that far too many students now go to university and we need to begin going backwards to the elitism of the past where most students move on to apprenticeships. Cutting funding for courses they do not like seems to be the lever they are planning to use – but few are predicting that the current UK government will survive beyond the election next year, so we should not start worrying yet.
The UK government issues this advice, which is relatively sound and helpful:
“While grades play a big part in university applications, admissions teams also consider a broad range of information about a student, including their predicted grades, personal statement, teacher references or other assessments and interviews.
“Of course, every year there is competition for the top places or on the most popular courses but there will always be plenty of options for students at another university, through clearing.
“While higher education opens many doors for those who study at this level, it is by no means the right option for everyone, including those who achieve the highest grades.
“There are now many exciting options outside of a three-year degree, including technical and vocational courses, and degree apprenticeships.”
Achievement across British Curriculum Schools in the UAE
So what does all this mean?
We begin where we started. This year, at SchoolsCompared.com, British Exams Week will be about celebrating the achievements of every school and every student. That means too celebrating every teacher, every parent and the whole educational infrastructure, including our school regulators, that have played their part in these bizarre cliff edges that our students face.
What will happen tomorrow, what happened before… ultimately does not matter in that context. Should not matter.
Let governments and Exam Boards do what they will – let us not play their games and take anything from the achievements of our young people, schools and families or the amazing opportunities and lives ahead of each of them.
British Exams Week 2023 is a time in which our students, schools and families, every single one of them, beyond deserve their place in all the sparkles of acclaim we can heap on them.
Join us.
Further information
British School Exams Week on SchoolsCompared.com begins on Wednesday 16th August 2023 and continues through to Friday 25th August 2023
Learn about the official position on GCSE, BTEC and A Level Results in 2023 here.
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