Examiner says A-level regrading fell short

Up to 35,000 A-level students should have their exam results rechecked, a senior examiner said yesterday.

Roger Porkess, who has written a maths syllabus for the Oxford and Cambridge and RSA exam board, said the independent inquiry into this summer's fiasco should have looked at the scripts of all the teenagers affected by changes to the setting of grades.

Mike Tomlinson, the former chief schools inspector who led the inquiry, limited its scope to subjects where exam board chief executives had lifted the boundaries of grade by six marks. Mr Porkess claimed all three exam boards – Edexcel and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance as well as the OCR – had changed grade boundaries after coming under pressure from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the Government's exams watchdog, to reduce the pass rate.

He admitted it was "hard to do more than guess" at the number of extra students who deserved a recheck – but put it at between 20,000 and 35,000. "The application of the cut-off [by Mr Tomlinson] will have inevitably left some candidates with a lower A-level grade than would have been the case if all the grade thresholds had been restored," he added.

Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrats' education spokes-man and a former headmaster, demanded that Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, reopen the first stage of the Tomlinson inquiry, which was designed to establish how many A-level results needed to be altered.

A spokesman for Mr Tomlinson said the former chief schools inspector had interviewed Mr Porkess during the course of his inquiry.

He said: "If there is hard evidence – and we mean hard evidence – that Mr Porkess or anyone else thinks there are students who should have their grades reviewed, Mr Tomlinson will consider it."

The Department for Education and Skills rejected demands for the first stage of the inquiry to be reopened, stressing it had full confidence in Mr Tomlinson's work.

A spokesman said: "The inquiry has given a clear way forward in re-establishing confidence in the A-level system. The people who stand to suffer most from any misguided attempt to reopen the matter are the hundreds of thousand of A-level students who worked hard to achieve these results in their examinations."

Margaret Hodge, minister for Higher Education, speaking on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, said: "Mr Tomlinson is a man in whom I have complete faith.

"Our job now is not to again unsettle children but to restore confidence in this gold standard qualification."