Last Thursday, I was one of the many students who received their A-level results (Editorial, 17 August). Although I didn’t achieve the exact grades I needed, I still managed to get into my first-choice university. But I would like to comment on the way that the government has treated my year group.
The last proper formal exams I sat before my A-levels were my Sats in year 6. To expect a group of children to go through a pandemic and suffer all the consequences – a lack of proper education, mental health problems, huge disruption to our normal lives – and then sit full A-level exams seems extraordinary and cruel.
When you do your A-levels, a lot of the time you’re still using skills and knowledge developed during your GCSEs. So having missed out on big portions of this during the pandemic will definitely have had an impact on us. For the government to disregard this and treat us almost like some sort of statistical experiment in order to return to 2019 levels is appalling.
Far too many students will have fallen through the large gaps created by the pandemic and left to widen by the government. I feel let down by a government that doesn’t seem to care for its state schools.
Leo David Crown
Matlock, Derbyshire
• The education secretary shows crass insensitivity in her remark that no one would be interested in pupils’ exam results 10 years after the event (Thousands fewer students in England awarded top A-level grades, 17 August). Gillian Keegan should surely be sticking up for the value of the government’s assessment and qualifications system, not undermining it.
The A-level has been proclaimed as the “gold standard” qualification and the route to higher qualifications, better employment and higher earning potential. By suggesting that no one will care about the results in 10 years’ time, Keegan has undermined the whole notion, and dismissed the anxieties and stresses of students awaiting their results.
There are thousands of young people who will go no further in their studies than A-levels, who will need the best grades they can get to ensure continuity of access to the best employment opportunities.
Bear in mind, too, that most of those who achieve well in any examination look back with pride on that achievement long after 10 years have elapsed (Keegan’s Wikipedia page proudly notes that she was the only pupil to get 10 O-levels at her school).
Alexander Cameron
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
• It would be Hercules’ 13th labour to plumb the depths of Tory ministers’ hypocrisy, but the education secretary’s words about how soon A-level grades will be forgotten would leave even him gasping. Would she have wanted to repeat them in front of students, parents and tutors at a local sixth form college where students – no less able than their predecessors – were in tears, bewildered by the results?
They are the victims of a cynically executed statistical manipulation: these are the first public exams they have taken under what might be termed “normal conditions” and yet they have to suffer the consequences of another piece of Tory chest‑beating. They are old enough to vote – I hope they don’t forget what happened.
Jim Maloney
Appley Bridge, Lancashire
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