Gavin Williamson must ensure no student is unjustly treated by this exams fiasco

Editorial: The prime minister and education secretary had plenty of time to plan for A-level results but do not seem to have used it well

The education secretary has had since March to do his homework on how to deal with the predictable consequences of cancelling public exams. He does not seem to have used that time well. Even after the crisis in Scotland that erupted last week, which warned him of the political costs of using an algorithm to generate exam grades, his last-minute cramming seems to have been to no good effect.

His solution – to offer students the chance to appeal on the basis of mock exam results, or to sit the actual exam in October – has failed to hold back the tide of unhappiness at a broad-brush approach that is bound to produce many individual injustices.

The essential problem with a formula that produces results that are in line with aggregate results from previous years is that individuals are not aggregates. Even if the English system uses more information about individual students’ prior performance than the Scottish one did, it is the final adjustment that causes hard cases. The final results have been “moderated” to bring them into line with previous years. It was this adjustment that was abandoned on Tuesday by John Swinney, the Scottish education secretary, which allowed generous teacher assessments to stand, inflating grades achieved by 14 per cent.

Despite Mr Williamson insisting that the situation in England is different, the essential unfairness is similar. Most sensitively, there is even the same element of class bias, as students in lower-income households find their grades marked down more than their better-off peers. That this is something of an optical illusion, in that their grades have still risen more than those of the better-off, compared with last year’s aggregate results, will do little to soften the feeling of individual unfairness. Nor does it seem fair that private schools have seen the biggest improvement in results, while sixth form and further education colleges have lagged behind.

What, then, should be done? It is a mark of the difficulty of the problem that the Labour Party has been loud in condemnation – “something has obviously gone horribly wrong”, said Sir Keir Starmer – but rather quieter on what Mr Williamson should do about it. Labour’s problem, given that it agreed with the cancellation of the exams in the first place, is that there are limits to what it can claim it would have done differently.

The leader of the opposition is right to urge the government to guarantee the right to individual appeals, and to waive the fees. But his call for “nothing to be ruled out, including the U-turn that was forced on the Scottish government last week”, sounded rather like bet-hedging.

What can be said is that one side effect of the coronavirus crisis is that there will be a sharp drop in the number of foreign students seeking places at UK universities, which means – although again this is in aggregate – there will be many more places available for domestic students. In many thousands of individual cases, this means students will still gain places even if they drop grades, which will reduce the unfairness somewhat.

Beyond that, Mr Williamson’s priority must be to address injustices at the individual level. He should try to avoid a full-scale Scottish-style rout, which would create more problems than it would solve, not least that it would penalise teachers who made honest assessments of their students’ likely grades. But to do that, he must throw everything at allowing quick and straightforward appeals – which must be allowed to take into account more than mock results, given that not all schools held mock exams and those that did will often have marked students severely in order to spur them on for the real thing.

The aim must be to ensure that no student feels they have been unjustly treated by an impersonal algorithm.