Ofqual’s guidance U-turn shows how broken the education system is

Editorial: If there are problems this week with GCSE results, as seems likely, Gavin Williamson’s job could become untenable

The chaos over the A-Level exam results was profoundly predictable and all the more depressing for that. It is monstrously unfair for the students who have found that their hard work is downgraded by a computer program. It is even more absurd that a known problem – the difficulties that come with using information from mock exams to create a fair assessment of ability – should be first ignored, then met by the quick and inadequate response of downgrading more than one-third of the results.

The students who protested against this absurdity are right to be angry. But so too are the much larger numbers of young people who have not made public protests, but fear that their life chances have been damaged by government incompetence. No one can choose the moment at which they are born, go to and leave school, go to university. So school-leavers this year have been exceptionally unlucky. They have potentially missed graduation assemblies. They face the prospect of not being able to enjoy the full undergraduate experience if they start their courses this year. And the unsettling economic background hangs over one of the most important transitions of anyone’s life – the move out of secondary education to whatever lies beyond.

This weekend, Ofqual’s decision to suspend the A-level appeals criteria was described as “farcical” by the Conservative chair of Westminster’s Education Committee. If the students are rightly angry, so too are the government’s own supporters.

So what’s to be done? There is a rough-and-ready fix, which is to allow students to have the choice of picking either their mock results or those results as modified by the algorithm. Decency and common sense require nothing less. There needs also to be an effective appeals system acknowledging where the mocks themselves might have been unfairly marked and accordingly misrepresent a student’s ability. Does this mean that some students will end up with higher A-level grades than they might otherwise have achieved? Well, yes, for in some cases that will be true. Does this undermine what is claimed to be the “gold standard” of the UK educational system? Surely not. No system is perfect. The country can live with this patch on the system.

Universities need to play their part too by being flexible in their acceptance processes. It is very much in their self-interest to fill their places this year with the best domestic students, for the supply of international students will inevitably be sharply down. There have been some encouraging responses, such as that of Oxford’s Worcester College, which has said that it will honour the offers it has made despite the results. The university sector as a whole must be flexible in coping with this unprecedented situation.

There is a wider point here. The performance of this government is far from gold standard. That of Gavin Williamson, the education minister, seems particularly weak. He will doubtless be sent on his way at the next reshuffle. And if there are similar problems on Thursday with the GCSE results, as seems likely, then his job might well become untenable. But while there is a people problem in the cabinet, there is also a structural problem in the way in which the education system is ordered. This is not about politics. It is about the future of the country and the young people who are going, a few years from now, to run it.