A Level Results: What is behind the grades clampdown?
Blog 10 August 17th 2023. On A level results day, we challenge the assertion from Gillian Keegan that tougher grading is about fairness.
James Whiting (General Secretary SEA) argues that grade rationing by OFQUAL keeps more working class learners out of higher education.
The Tories chose their Sunday paper for middle class intellectuals, the Sunday Times, to explain why there were going to be fewer top A level grades awarded this year. They certainly wanted the message to be delivered. The topic was featured in the front-page headline article, the leading editorial and a personal piece from the Secretary of State for Education. All three were designed to deliver the same message which goes something like this:-
· Over generous grading during the pandemic led to students getting on to inappropriately challenging university courses and therefore dropping out.
· University courses are not appropriate for many (working class) students any way who would be better off with apprenticeships.
· Employers and universities need to ‘understand the distinction between grades’ to support recruitment.
Was the awarding of top grades during the pandemic over generous? How is OFQUAL squaring the circle of not issuing grade quotas and at the same time getting tougher on awarding grades? Is there a demand from employers for fewer top grades? Are drop-out rates ‘surging’? If so what is the cause? What is the real purpose behind the tougher approach to grading? This blog piece will attempt to answer these questions and put an alternative narrative forward.
Has there been over-generous grading? What is the role of OFQUAL?
Teachers and centres decided on grades in 2020 and 2021 meaning a much higher percentage of top grades were awarded. For example, in 2020 14% of A level grades were A* compared with 8% in 2019. When under Gavin Williamson, OFQUAL decided to use an algorithm based on previous performance of the school and other factors, to award grades. there was an outcry leading to him having to back down. The difference between then and now is that OFQUAL are controlling the percentage of grades as they always have, but allowing OFQUAL to draw up parameters for awarding grades based on a range of data is accepted. even expected, as part of the grade awarding process.
Examiners (who are mainly teachers with a different hat on) mark the papers according to criteria laid out in the subject specification. They award marks not grades. Within each aboard a Chief Examiner ensures that all examiners are working to the same standards and a further meeting between boards takes place to ensure standardisation across exam boards. A comparison takes place with previous years to factor in the level of difficulty of the paper. You would think that that would be the end of the process and marks could then be given grade equivalents but it is not.
The above graph shows how OFQUAL have successfully reigned in grades this year to bring them into line with the proportion of top grades in 2019. They have been busy predicting, for students and parents, that the percentage of higher grades awarded this year will be similar to 2019 i.e the same as it was before the pandemic. They make this forecast without reference to the work of the students and how well they might have achieved. Grades will be lower regardless. OFQUAL deny there is a quota of top grades yet they have already made their mind up about the approximate percentage of grades to be awarded in each category..
In an interview in the TES in answer to the question ‘What data is used in making decisions about grade boundaries?’ OFQUAL Chief Jo Saxton is suitably opaque.
‘We set the rules for the exam boards, of what they need to do and if they feel that there are reasons why they can’t comply with the parameters that we’ve set with them, they have to report it to us. So they can’t kind of go rogue.’
These parameters are designed are to ensure that student performance is roughly the same for year to year. Variation might be allowed should the cohort have done particularly well or badly in KS2 SATS and a National Reference Test which gauges standards in the cohort is also often applied.
In other words, the grade a student achieves is not necessarily an accurate reflection of how well they have achieved against the criteria in the specification. Instead, data about the cohort the student finds themselves in (in other words an algorithm) is applied before a final grade is awarded to prevent ‘grade inflation’.
The much-derided teacher awarded grades could well have been a more accurate indication of student attainment than the grades awarded this year which are subjected to this mystifying process. If a robust moderation process had been put in place in 2020, this would certainly have been the case.
Do Employers and Universities argue for fewer top grades?
The justification for limiting the number of top grades using an obfuscating mathematical process otherwise known as a form of norm referencing, is that employers and universities need to be able to ‘choose the best’ candidates. The survey of recruitment businesses below shows that only 25% of them use A level results at all because they do not capture the full set of skills a candidate may have.
It is clear that using linear examinations as the sole means of assessment, is not particularly helpful to employers. Universities too, often supplement exam grades with an interview process with Oxford and Cambridge using interviews for the assessment of all candidates. A wider range of assessment techniques with awarded grades mapping directly to specific criteria would surely be more useful to both universities and employers. So- called fears about grade inflation then appear to be invented by the Tories and their friends in the right-wing press.
Are drop-out rates ‘surging’? If so what is the cause?
The answer to the first question is yes. According to the Student Loan Company there has been a rise of 28% of students not continuing past the first year of a degree course. The rate of non-continuation is still low though compared with many other countries. Also the SLC figure does not include students who can pay for their course up front.
Gillian Keegan offers no evidence to support her assertion that over generous grading is responsible for the rising drop-out rate. Her own Office for Students and the NUS offer more convincing explanations.
The Office for Students notes:-
· 81.6 per cent of students from the most deprived backgrounds completed their course, compared to 92.2 per cent from the most advantaged group
· 82.5 per cent of students eligible for free school meals completed their course, compared to 90.8 per cent of students who were not eligible
· 80.7 per cent of black students completed their course, compared to 88.5 per cent of white students.
According to a survey by the National Union of Students, 96% of young adults currently in HE have said that they are cutting back on essential costs such as doing laundry or showering with one third living on a monthly budget of less than 50 pounds. Most students said the value of their maintenance package is not enough to afford the weekly shop, transport to their education provider or energy bills. The data also highlights a cost-of-learning crisis, with 75% of students saying they would not be able to continue to afford course materials without more support. 11% of students are now accessing foodbanks. The survey suggests the crisis is having a devastating impact on wellbeing, with 90% of students reporting an impact on their mental health, and 31% reporting this to be a ‘major’ impact.
The NUS goes on to say that amongst the hardest hit by the cost-of-living crisis are students with caring responsibilities, disabled students, estranged students, and students from a low socio-economic background. The conclusions one would expect from the OFS faced with these figures, is that students with limited financial means are struggling in a Tory generated cost of living crisis, to fund day to day student life.
John Blake, director of OFS, recognises the problem:- ‘this data shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds and underrepresented groups have been much more likely to drop out than their more advantaged peers’. But apparently this has nothing to do with poorer students struggling to make ends meet. Instead it is the fault of those universities ‘with weaker outcomes’ (i.e. higher dropout rates) which have ‘high proportions of students with disadvantaged backgrounds’. It is ‘patronising’ he suggests to argue that disadvantaged students do not deserve quality courses. He forgets to say that the record of elite ‘quality’ universities in accepting disadvantaged students is appalling and appears to want to put the boot into the institutions which often provide opportunities for students who are the first in their family to access higher education.
The evidence for the cause of the drop-out rate surge points to disadvantaged students in particular struggling with the cost of living to be a major factor.
Who is most affected by the grading clampdown and what is the purpose of it?
A survey by the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) found disadvantaged students had not received the support they needed to recover lost learning during the pandemic. Forecasters are now saying that up to 50,000 students will miss out on A to A* grades they would have received last year because of the government’s efforts to clamp down on top grades. Lee Elliot Major (Exeter University) quoted in the Guardian says ‘What the results this year will show is that the profound legacy of the pandemic is to exacerbate the educational inequalities that were already there. I’m absolutely sure that we’ll see a widening of those inequalities, but I think that it’s also going to affect middle-income pupils as well as low-income pupils.’
Meanwhile Gillian Keegan in the Sunday Times article says “Ultimately this is about fairness, and making sure we have a system that treats pupils fairly compared with previous years, and equally, whatever background they come from, school they attend, or part of the country the grow up in.”
As usual with the Tories, what they say they are doing does not equate to the real impact of their actions. They claim to want to ensure that disadvantaged working-class students have equal opportunities. At the same time, they attack the very institutions who are providing those opportunities (I do not, by the way, equate earning-power post course with opportunity) and patronise working class students by saying they would be better off in our woefully inadequate apprenticeship programmes. Rationing top grades is one of the ways in which a core purpose in education for them is realised. It is about selecting an elite and at the same time ensuring the children of those who are already members of it get the better chances. Its about creating a false hierarchy of knowledge where the academic always trumps the technical and vocational. Think about the ridiculous contradictions which emerge. English, History and Creative Writing courses at Goldsmiths College, which recruits large numbers of black and working-class students, are deemed to not to lead to strong learning opportunities and are therefore supposedly acting as a false prospectus for working class students. The hypocrisy is palpable. For the Tories the working class would never take a course because they were interested in it and wanted to broaden their outlook. Only the privileged can aspire to education for its own sake. The Goldsmiths courses are therefore under threat of closure. Humanities and English courses in elite universities such as Oxford though are protected because they lead to higher earnings due at least, in part, to most of the students being from wealthy backgrounds already and to the connections they can make whilst studying there. As a Goldsmiths lecturer said to me on a picket line ‘the Tories don’t want the poor to study English’.
The situation is the exact opposite of Keegan’s assertion of fairness. Unlike Scotland and Wales where a slower pace of post COVID change has been put in place, the Tories have been in a rush to prevent the disadvantaged working class from getting the grades they deserve. This is part of a pattern where across the education system in England, it is poorer working class students who are unfairly treated by Tory education policies.
We should organize society, our public school systems and job training programs, around the concept of collective ownership instead of private businesses.
REMOVE MONEY, REMOVE CORRUPTION
If every worker got in exchange for their professional careers everything that they needed to have a happy, balanced life in a safe and healthy world governed by fair laws and modern practices, then our use of science and ethics to generate daily goods and services, as basic human entitlements, will have fulfilled the purpose of socialism: to ensure “universal protections for all by all” without using money anymore or national currencies to uphold private capital, maintain structural wealth, or support banks and financing and other profit-making activities.
#ScientificSocialism