The countdown clock is ticking, the panicky last-minute revision reaching feverish levels. No parent currently tiptoeing around snappy, stressed teenagers will need reminding that exam season now looms in England and Wales, or that it’s already under way in Scotland. But if nerves are jangling more than usual this year, both in staff rooms and at home, that’s hardly surprising.
After three years of pandemic grade inflation, caused first by teachers having to conjure up grades and then by exam boards making understandable allowances for what children had been through, this is the year that exam regulator Ofqual finally plans to ratchet GCSE and A-level grades back down to normal (though with some leeway on the borderline). The trouble is that in many schools, normal still feels a very long way off.
The teenagers currently hunched over their revision flashcards have endured years of adults moving the goalposts; shunting them in and out of lockdown, chopping and changing arrangements for exams, promising help to catch up and not quite delivering. Having balked at the £15bn cost of the recommendations of its own “catchup tsar”, Kevan Collins, Boris Johnson’s government sought to fix things on the cheap – but even then, it turns out that a third of the money allocated to its national tutoring programme for extra lessons hasn’t been drawn down. (Heads complain that the platform was difficult to use, didn’t meet their needs or that they couldn’t afford it, with costs part-subsidised by government and schools making up the difference.)
Children have lost further classroom time this year because of teachers’ strikes – although unions have promised to try to protect exam years from industrial action this week and next – and mental health problems are through the roof, with many parents struggling to get help for their children from an overstretched NHS. This year’s results will be a crucial litmus test of what all this turbulence has meant, not just for secondary school pupils sitting formal exams, but for primary schoolchildren doing SATs.
The Northern Powerhouse Partnership, set up to help close the north-south gap, has written to Ofqual pleading for more generous marking this year: the group’s chief executive, Henri Murison, has said heads are now “really worried” about the impact on children’s life chances. The NPP has already warned of a new north-south divide emerging in education, with children having missed more lessons in areas seeing persistently high Covid-19 rates, from Burnley in the north-west to Hull on the east coast. Heads in deprived neighbourhoods are particularly worried that children who became semidetached from school during lockdown and have since fallen farther and farther behind simply won’t turn up to sit their papers.
As one headteacher in a big northern city tells me, it’s increasingly hard to untangle these consequences of the pandemic in schools from a deeper sense of economic gloom. At least in lockdown, he could reassure the kids that it wouldn’t be this tough for ever, and hand out free food parcels. But as Covid-19 has receded, it has become painfully obvious that struggling is the new normal for many families in a cost of living crisis. He sees pupils beginning to question whether working hard for their exams really will pay off, when even people in “good” jobs say they can’t make ends meet. Lately this head spends much of his time battling social media myths that buying bitcoin or becoming a YouTuber are better options than getting good GCSEs.
Even among middle-class parents whose children have every chance of bouncing back, there’s anxiety about them being the guinea pigs for Ofqual’s planned “glide path” back to normal. Will future employers remember, looking at their children’s CVs, which year groups were unusually likely to get A*s and which were bumped back down to earth? Although Ofqual insists it’s taking steps to cushion this year’s cohort from the effects of a return to 2019 marking practices, several summers of uproar over exam results have left many parents distrustful of a seemingly opaque process.
And for sixth-formers making university choices on the strength of predicted A-level grades, there’s an extra layer of anxiety. How reliable can predictions be when they’re made by teachers who haven’t seen a “real” A grade since 2019? If some predictions are wildly out, does that mean a scramble for places in clearing this summer? But as ever, it’s the most vulnerable kids who are at greatest risk in this rocky year, when nobody quite knows what to expect.
After lockdown, there was a brief but genuinely hopeful moment when it felt as if something really could change. Children had been sent home from school largely – though not exclusively – to protect wider society from a virus that rarely kills the young, and that left adults with a profound sense of obligation to make up for everything they had missed. Parents grateful to have had gardens for their stir-crazy toddlers to play in understood as never before how lucky they were, compared with families trapped in overcrowded flats.
There was a wellspring of empathy and goodwill there waiting to be tapped, but instead it’s been allowed to trickle dry, leaving behind a sense of opportunity squandered and a nagging anxiety about the implications for these children as they grow up. If this summer’s results confirm such fears, then we have to be ready to act, before the children of Covid-19 fall any further behind.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
