August is always an anxious month for young people awaiting exam results. But this year brought an added stress: Ofqual, the exams regulator, had indicated that this year grade distributions would return to pre-pandemic standards, meaning pupils would be subject to tougher grade boundaries than a year ago. A-level and GCSE results are now in, and together they confirm what a growing body of evidence has already indicated: that the pandemic has resulted in significant amounts of learning loss, particularly for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And as Prof Sir Kevan Collins, the government’s former education recovery tsar, tells the Observer today, these results are the product of ministers failing to invest sufficiently in support for children to help them make up ground they lost during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.
The headline results are lower than last year, as expected: after A-level and GCSE results were unavoidably inflated as a result of moving to teacher-assessed grades in 2020 and 2021, Ofqual was always going to need to reverse towards the 2019 grade distribution; the question was simply how fast it would get there. Ofqual ultimately decided on a two-year pathway back, arguably the right decision in that it is better overall for young people, universities and employers to have maximum consistency in terms of what a certain grade means year to year; as a result, there will be three years of results that should be interpreted differently to what came before and after the pandemic, not four or five.
