Four years ago, the press was sent into a greater-than-usual fury about the release of A-level results. For the first time, because of the pandemic, no exams had been sat. Instead, teachers submitted grades awarded and a rank order of students from best to worst. This was moderated by Ofqual to ensure that there was roughly the same distribution of marks as in previous years – and 40 per cent of grades were revised downwards. In cases where schools or individual pupils had exceeded expectations, their achievement was not recognised.
Though the government U-turned and teachers’ grades were restored, Sammy Wright identifies this in his book Exam Nation as the point that “everything beg[an] to unravel”. The Department for Education (DfE) had prioritised the distribution of grades over what each child merited “because our education system demands failure with such persistence that it seemed better to them to be unfair than to be over-generous”. Despite what they are told in assemblies, not every child can succeed if they only apply themselves: the system requires that some fail. Wright, a teacher of 22 years who at the time sat on the government’s Social Mobility Commission, calls this “a kind of mass gaslighting”: pupils “are explicitly given the language of pass or fail, and implicitly given a value system that says the cleverer you are, the better you are. And this is done in the full knowledge that not all of them are capable of a pass.”
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