The Observer view on basing pupils' results on teacher assessment | Observer editorial

Gavin Williamson, once again, has passed schools a poisoned chalice to avoid any political risk to himself

A pandemic that has seen schools shut for months, exams cancelled for two years running and has consigned the majority of university students to a distance-learning model, was always going to wreak havoc with children and young people’s lives. However, time and again the government has, through a mixture of incompetence, carelessness and a desire to pass the buck, made things worse.

So it was with last summer’s examinations fiasco. The cancellation of all exams resulted in pupils enduring weeks of uncertainty as the government insisted on using a crude algorithm to adjust teacher assessments to reduce any grade inflation, then dropped this when all the problems – about which government had been warned – came to fruition. This created significant problems for universities, with some over-subscribed and others under-subscribed as a product of the resulting grade inflation. And it may yet have long-term impacts on the class of 2020 as employers regard their GCSE and A-level results as less reliable.

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Coronavirus | The Guardian

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