I’ve reluctantly concluded that the ‘beautiful people pictured with their exam results’ discourse is intractable because you can’t point to an image of smiling students and crow ‘Finally! An ugly child collects their grades.’
Anyway, today’s GCSE results are not straightforward to parse. This is largely because comparing this year’s grades with 2021 is a little like comparing apples with oranges eaten under exam conditions.
26.3 per cent of GCSEs were awarded a 7/A. This represents a drop from last year, when 28.9 per cent of exams were given top marks. Of course, results in 2021 were decided by teacher assessment and reached unprecedented heights.
The better comparison is with 2019 – the last year in which exams were held – when 20.8 per cent of papers received the top grades. The trend is similar for the pass rate of 4/C, which fell this year compared with last but was higher than in 2019.
There is also a clear London success story to be told. As our Education Editor Anna Davis reports, around one third of GCSEs taken in the capital were awarded the top scores, compared with a quarter or less in most other English regions.
London also enjoyed the greatest growth from 2019, with a 6.9 percentage point increase. In other words, the capital is pulling away. And it really is remarkable the more you think about it.
Two decades ago, London had some of the worst-performing schools in the country. But thanks to significant investment and policies such as the London Challenge, a school improvement programme launched in 2003 that focused on sharing good practice, we now have many of the best.
I won’t try to come off as an educational expert, but a report by the CfBT Education Trust and the Centre for London found major improvements in London’s schools between 2000-2014, and that the London Challenge was a significant factor, alongside three other interventions: Teach First, the academies programme and improved support from local authorities.
Elsewhere in the paper, the Met Police has branded suggestions of racial bias in its handling of the Owami Davies missing persons case “unsubstantiated”. The student nurse, 24, was found safe in Hampshire on Tuesday after her disappearance from her hometown of Grays in Essex ignited a two-month search.
In the comment pages, Andy Burnham says welcome to the summer of 2022 – when everything was falling to pieces and the Government’s response was to stick up a summer-long “out of office” sign.
While professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, hopes lower GCSE results will restore the value of grades.
And finally, Ben McCormack brings you the best burgers in London from Bleecker to Blacklock.
