In which: day 141

I am a teacher of 15 years experience and I examine at A level for an exam board.

I am utterly horrified by the government’s announcement of the so-called ‘triple lock’ for A level results. It is utterly unworkable and hugely unfair to allow students to ask for their mock grade to be made their outcome. Gavin Williamson clearly has no idea how schools operate and has not consulted with teachers regarding this announcement.

Mock exams are not rigorous nor a level playing field. They are taken at different times of the year - sometimes November, sometimes January, sometimes March. Some schools will have shut before the mocks were sat or marked. This means that they aren’t comparable between centres. They aren’t even necessarily comparable between subjects within the same school as some departments might use last year’s embargoed paper so will be very close to exam conditions where others may have very different exam papers, particularly when mocks are sat before the course ended. Additionally, some papers and results will have been thoroughly moderated to check marking, but others might not have been. This is utterly unfair to candidates - it is, I feel, against natural justice to have such a completely arbitrary system. Mocks are not a fair metric to judge students by as they are simply not comparable.

The most important thing to note is that we already factored in those inconsistencies with regards to mocks, and then used other data such as assessment, coursework (which otherwise would be completely ignored this year), AS outcomes and a comparison against historic data to give the centre assessed grade. The allocation of centre assessed grades took weeks of work - it doesn’t reflect the way UCAS predicted grades are made in any way and the inconsistencies in those is one of the reasons I have seen quoted as to why teachers’ predictions are suspected.

The government seem determined to ignore the incredibly detailed and thorough work teachers did in submitting centre assessed grades. I note that Scotland has come round to accepting our professional judgement and I implore the government to abandon this unfair and unworkable shoddy compromise and instead reinstate the professional judgement of teachers.