On the 13th of August 2020, Gavin Williamson (The Secretary of State for Education) and the government faced catastrophic embarrassment over their poor handling of the moderation system they used to decide the exam grades of 2020. Williamson and the Department for Education were keen to regain students’ trust and to learn from their previous errors. However, was this just the beginning of the fiasco in the making‽
Following on from the u-turn in scrapping the algorithm used for A-level and GCSE 2020 grades, Williamson and his team were eager to ensure that the 2021 exams wouldn’t be the same; as he affirmed many times “GCSE and A level exams will be going ahead”.
On the 3rd of December, Gavin Williamson made a firm reiteration that exams would still be going ahead, live to Kay Burley on Sky News, reassuring students all across England.
Then, as Boris Johnson came to announce his reversed plans for a third national lockdown, Williamson, on the 6th of January 2021, also reversed his once-so-adamant plan as he announced that the 2021 exams couldn’t go ahead.
Anger and frustration fused as questions such as why this plan B hadn’t been enacted earlier in the year, rather than left to the last minute?
Soon after, Williamson announced that teachers would decide on students’ grades based on a range of evidence. But because the cancellation of exams was announced so late and was so unplanned, it meant that collection of evidence proved much harder than if schools had been supported to do it from the start of the academic year. So the only valid evidence students had was whatever they had to do after the announcement.
To add to the ‘evidence’ many schools still made students sit exams anyway – predominantly the 2019 papers that weren’t used in the previous year’s cancelled exams.
In one sense, exams were cancelled but, in another, students still did exams – just another riddle from the government for students who were already used to their constant u-turns and ‘undo’ policies.
In addition to students still having to sit exams, many were unprepared and unable to show their true academic potential due to the added weeks or months of self-isolation and the missed learning and revision in the run-up to the exams.
An independent piece of research was conducted with a handful of ‘class of 2021’ students across the Yorkshire & Humber region to complete a survey questioning their experiences throughout the handling of this year’s exams.
Results showed the following:
- 100% of the students say they still ended up doing ‘some sort of exam/ assessment’ while 63% of them were still in exam conditions.
- Only 25% of students said they felt the exams were assessed fairly while 62.5% of them said they felt it wasn’t. 12.5% said ‘there could have been better ways’
- 25% of students said they ‘would have rather sat the exam with lower grade boundaries + help sheets’
- When asked whether they thought exams were going to go ahead at the start of the academic year, 63% of students said yes while 37% said no.
- When asked how well they thought Gavin Williamson had done in handling education this year, 67% said ‘extremely bad’ while 33% said ‘neither good nor bad’.
- The last question asked was whether they felt happy and satisfied with how their last year went. 70% of students said no while 20% said yes. 10% voted ‘neither yes or no’
The type of exams and assessments the government expects young people to succeed at requires focus, concentration and stability in one’s mind and surroundings. But they created an atmosphere of chaos for students. The constant changes in messages and restrictions imposed in and out of the classroom created even more uncertainty, confusion and distraction.
Their arrogance and lack of sincerity made us feel like the government was completely against us. No sense of clarity or support was given to us at one of the most important and stressful stages of our lives. Their actions and the attack on our education was a complete dereliction of everything they said and promised to young people.
Throughout that time, I genuinely felt that my education was devalued and for a government to make not just one, but millions of students feel that way, makes me wonder how can they ever gain trust and confidence from a young person again.
