Teachers, parents and students will feel a sense of “anger and frustration” when A-level results are published on Thursday, the head of a major schools group has warned.
A-level grades in England are being brought back down to pre-pandemic levels after two years of massive grade inflation, but grades in Wales and Northern Ireland will remain higher until 2024.
Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis chain of academies, said: “So many young teachers are idealistic and care so passionately. That’s why there’s a sense of frustration and anger and anything that isn’t offering equality is so hard for them to bear.”
Teenagers picking up their results in England this week will get lower grades than those in previous years who benefitted from inflated grades during the pandemic when exams were cancelled and marks were awarded by teachers.
But this year’s students still had to contend with cancelled GCSEs, pandemic lockdowns, missed learning and teacher strikes, Mr Chalke said.
Many students in Wales and Northern Ireland were also given advance information about what topics to expect in their exam papers this summer to mitigate some of the impact of the pandemic, but students in England were not.
Mr Chalke, whose academy chain runs 52 schools, said: “It is the reality that England has chosen to return to the pre-Covid marking values, and that jeopardises, it could be said unfairly, these children in the light of the two previous cohorts.
“They are all aware of that. Many of them will feel not just that they have failed, but they are hard done by, so as well as stress and anxiety and deflation there will be anger.”
He said teachers will have students in their classes whose parents had mental health breakdowns during the lockdowns, or whose parents separated, or lost jobs or died.
He added: “All of that will be going through a teacher’s system when they find out that a child has not got the grades they always longed for.”
He warned that teenagers who miss out on predicted grades may feel “very fragile, with huge questions about their worth and purpose”, and teachers and parents must be prepared to help them by offering perspective and support.
This year’s A-level students have been described as the “unluckiest cohort” of the pandemic, because they faced disruption during Covid, a return to normal exams and a predicted intense squeeze on university places because of a rise in the number of 18-year-olds in the population and more places going to international students.
Mr Chalke said disadvantaged children’s education was affected worse by pandemic lockdowns, and Thursday’s exam results are likely to reveal the gap between rich and poor is growing.
He said Covid created a “completely uneven playing field”, adding: “It amazes me personally that in Wales and Northern Ireland returning to the pre-2019 standard of marking has been put off until next year, so they won’t get back to that pre-pandemic regime until 2024, whereas it has been imposed in England this year.”
