GCSE English (Marking)

Julie Hilling Excerpts

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin]

It is clear that there is no confidence at all in Ofqual among education professionals, among people working in industry and business who I met the other day—they clearly do not have confidence in Ofqual—and, most importantly, among parents and the students themselves. Ofqual has failed that crucial test.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

If the exam marking was so fundamentally flawed and the exam was too easy or whatever, why was the barrier between A and A* not changed? Why were those marks kept the same? Why was the C grade changed?

[Nic Dakin]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As I shall explain, there were impacts on other grade levels. The focus has primarily been on the borderline between C and D because that is such a crucial progression lever for young people, but there have been effects on other grades as well.

Why does this matter? It matters because GCSE English is a progression qualification: it makes a difference to individuals’ lives, to what they do next and to where they go next. It matters because we have a duty to young people to ensure that the assessments at 16 are fair. They have clearly not been fair this year. Worse than that, the Secretary of State and the regulator obfuscate, appearing more interested in covering up and protecting themselves than in ensuring that young people are treated fairly. Worse still, as my hon. Friend says, the focus has been on the unfairness to students missing out on a C and having to adjust their careers accordingly, but as a former principal of a sixth-form college I know that those students getting a B instead of an A will be disadvantaged next year when they apply for higher education. Their choices will be limited.

On 23 August, the Secretary of State for Education received news of the fall in success rates for students in their GCSEs with a certain smug satisfaction: failure for young people was success for him. It was all about rigour, standards and other buzzwords, not about achievement, progression and fair outcomes. Gradually, though, a darker story began to emerge. As schools analysed the results, they identified a significant change in how GCSE English had been marked in June compared with January. Something had gone very wrong, with grade boundaries being significantly adjusted in year to ensure that fewer students met their predicted grades.

In one school in my constituency, because of the boundary changes, the percentage of students achieving five A* to C grades fell from 80% based on January marking to 62% in June. As a consequence, the percentage of students achieving the important five A* to C grades including mathematics and English fell from 62% to 52%. At another local school, the changes meant that 25 pupils did not achieve the C grade they were predicted to achieve, and the school’s English results fell from 53% achieving C last year to 40% this year. At another school, almost 25% of the cohort taking exams were negatively affected by the boundary changes. These are drastic and startling figures, and I assure you, Mr Hollobone, that in all my years as an English teacher and then a sixth-form college principal, I have never seen anything quite like it.

One local head teacher described the impact on students and the school as catastrophic. Students who had achieved a C in English in January were re-timetabled for extra maths; they achieved their maths C in June, but because the school did not draw down their English marks until June, the C they had banked in January became a D in June. How on earth can that be fair?

Schools are very good at self-evaluation, but this episode has undermined their confidence in what they are doing. Their confidence in teaching GCSE English has also been undermined as further confused messages such as those we heard yesterday come out. There is also a lack of confidence about how they are preparing this year’s cohort for next year’s exam, so the impact of this year’s cock-up is being felt not only by this year’s students, but by next year’s students. That is why it is so important that the Government act now to put things right for the youngsters and schools affected.

The Association of School and College Leaders believes that one quarter of all secondary schools in England and Wales have been damaged. At first, it was thought that tens of thousands of pupils were affected, but the situation is far worse. We now know that 133,906 pupils have been affected on the boundary between grades C and D alone, before all the other boundaries are taken into account. If that injustice is not reversed it is likely to have a long-term impact on the social mobility of the students affected. Research from ASCL shows that those affected are disproportionately from areas of high deprivation, ethnic minority groups and poorer families. Parents have written to me to explain that their children have been devastated by the news that they cannot pursue the courses and jobs they had set their minds on. I have an example here of a student who has moved on to further education, whose mother writes:

“My daughter is one of the many thousands involved in this injustice and we've now heard that the AQA resit for English Language is 7th November. This fiasco needs to be sorted NOW before it’s too late! As it is she is having to do extra work to ‘revise’ for the resit on top of her college assignments. It’s simply not fair.”

Similarly, teachers have told me about the anxiety that the situation has caused them, with one describing Ofqual’s actions as immoral and inhuman.

Last week, The Times Educational Supplement published letters between Ofqual and Edexcel showing that the regulator had, at the 11th hour, pressured the exam board into revising the grade boundaries against its professional judgment. Ofqual told the exam board to

“review the English award at grade C in order to produce outcomes that are much closer to the predictions and so in line with national standards”.

We must remember that the predictions are based on key stage 2 assessments at age 11. In its response, Edexcel protested that

“we have put considerable effort into producing what we consider to be a fair award”,

adding that

“our award is a fair award and we do not believe a further revision of our grade boundaries is justified”.

Those are the professionals, who have looked at the work, not just carried out a statistical exercise. Ofqual then sent a final letter, warning Edexcel that

“their expectation”

was

“that Edexcel will produce outcomes...that are within the 1% of the overall prediction”.

Edexcel then capitulated.

Last week, the chief regulator and the Secretary of State appeared before the Select Committee on Education to answer the growing avalanche of questions. It was a master class in obfuscation. After their appearance, the Chair of the Select Committee spoke for everyone when he said:

“There are many important questions in this to which we do not have satisfactory answers”,

adding that the explanations given were “inadequate”. The Secretary of State has hovered between bullish and sheepish in his response to the gathering storm. He blusters and hides behind an unaccountable quango, which in turn hides behind a cloak of statistical confusion.

Adding further to the unfolding chaos, the regulator in Wales—the Welsh Government—has taken clear action by ordering the Welsh board to re-award grades to Welsh candidates. That means that students in Wales will be treated fairly, but my constituents who did the Welsh board English GCSE—believe it or not, Mr Hollobone, the Welsh exam board is popular in Scunthorpe—will not. How on earth can that be proper? How can it be just?

There is a further contradiction and a further worry. The Secretary of State seems to be saying that GCSE results must not go up, but that in every school more than 40% of pupils must get five A* to C grades. Those who have signed up to a conspiracy version of history see that as an agenda not only to fail students, but to fail schools. A consortium of schools, academies, further education colleges, local authorities and professional associations is taking legal action this week. I wish them success, but it should not have come to that—wasting public money, time and energy on legal costs and process. Ofqual and the Secretary of State should be big enough to hold up their hands, admit that they got it wrong and take action to put it right. That is the moral code that we teach our young people, and our leaders should also follow it.

Who is accountable for the cock-up? An unelected quango that is doing the Secretary of State’s bidding. Surely it would be better if he were directly accountable to the young people of this country and ordered an immediate independent inquiry into what has happened or, better still, followed the Welsh Government’s example and ordered Ofqual to instruct the exam boards to re-award their grades, so that all students taking the exam this year are treated fairly and in line with their contemporaries the year before.

Being a modern MP, I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers what questions they wanted to be answered. Overwhelmingly, they were variations on the following. Can the Minister explain to youngsters and their families how pupils can get a lower mark in January and do better than someone who gets a higher mark in June? That is what happened this year. While the Minister is considering that, I will ask three further questions. Will she urge the Secretary of State to stand up and be counted, to apologise for this year’s cock-up and to take action to ensure that this year’s students are treated equally and fairly, based on the professional judgment of the exam boards—the people who have seen the children’s work? Will she say whether she is happy that achievement at 16 is apparently being capped by achievement at 11, in a move back to norm referencing? Finally, will she ask Ofsted not to fail schools that can demonstrate that they missed the threshold owing to the impact of GCSE English marking this summer?