Thread by @Samfr

It's probably worth a brief thread explaining how this could have happened without anyone breaking any of the rules or doing any cheating. (I.e. why it's really the Govt's fault not the schools).

https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1490396937698390019

Last year schools were told to award grades themselves. There was a vast array of options available to set these grades. They could use their own exams, or old ones, or class work. They could allow retakes. It was wide open.

Exam boards were told to quality assure this by sampling evidence from a range of schools. They could use data on whether schools were well above previous years to decide on their sampling. But they couldn't automatically reduce grades if the school could provide evidence.

This was because the previous year schools HAD been given a quota of grades based on previous performance (the infamous algorithm) and it was a disaster that required a rapid u-turn. They wanted to avoid that at all costs.

So as long as a school could provide evidence of a grade - and that evidence could be from multiple sources that no other school had used - them there was nothing an exam board could do and no rules had been broken.

Your average Winchester student (applies for all top private schools) will be around an A or A* anyway. It is not going to be difficult to get them to do some kind of assessment at which they perform at A* level. That's your evidence. Entirely legit. Within the rules.

In normal exams obviously lots of students capable of an A* will get an A because they don't perform quite to their best and it's multiple papers with no retakes. Very different.

Moreover In a normal exam year results are standardised and controlled to avoid inflation. This didn't happen at all due to their being no ability to compare what different schools had done and no statistical adjustments allowed.

So hardly surprising that this would happen. It happened in many state schools too. It's just more obvious at the very top end of the private system because nearly all their students (due to selection and wealth) are capable of top grades.

And moreover for a school *not to have done this* would have disadvantaged their students versus any school that did. Which is why I called it a prisoners dilemma policy. It was a deeply invidious position to put teachers in. It was the Government's choice to do so.

NB: you *could* design a much better system using teacher assessment but it will always be at much greater risked of being gamed than standardised externally assessed exams. And this will always help those with the pushiest parents + who look stereotypically "smart".

Which is why I will always be a strong advocate of proper exams in our education system. It's fairer for students. It doesn't put teachers in such difficult positions. And it benefits students from less traditionally educationally successful backgrounds.