PM risks “robbing a generation of their future” over exam unfairness, Starmer warns

Keir Starmer is set to warn that the Prime Minister risks “robbing a generation of young people of their future” unless he urgently tackles the unfairness in this year’s replacement exam results system.

The Labour leader is making the intervention following the SQA results scandal in Scotland last week and ahead of A-level and GCSE results being released in England on August 13th and 20th.

After protests and a bid by Scottish Labour to remove Scottish Education Secretary John Swinney from post, the SNP government has today announced that the downgrading will be abandoned and teacher estimates used instead.

Ahead of a meeting with teachers and parents in Wakefield on Wednesday, Starmer said: “Pupils and parents are rightly worried that years of hard work are about to be undone because a computer has decided to mark their child down.

“For too long, the Tories have considered the needs of young people as an afterthought when their needs should have been central.

“It’s a blatant injustice that thousands of hard-working young people risk having their futures decided on the basis of their postcode.

“The SNP have been forced into a humiliating U-turn after a shambolic few days. With 24 hours before results are released, I would urge the Prime Minister to change course, or he risks robbing a generation of their future.”

It has been reported that the scale of downgrading in England is expected to be even greater than the 124,000 teacher-estimated grades initially rejected in Scotland. Around 250,000 pupils will receive A-Level results on Thursday.

Details of the model being used to determine the English results will not be published until after they are revealed to students, but Labour is demanding that the government clarify now which pupils are likely to be worst affected.

To make the system introduced during the coronavirus crisis fairer, Labour is also calling on the government to help students correct their grades through an appeals process or by taking resits.

The government has proposed that pupils not satisfied with their grades will be able to take resits later this year. But Labour has accused the government of having “set out no credible plan for how this will happen”.

The opposition party is urging the government to ensure that no student can be moderated down to below a grade four in English or Maths, equivalent of the old C grade, because this has significant consequences for their life chances.

Labour is also calling for statutory guidance for providers of higher and further education to guarantee more flexibility on admissions of those affected by the standardisation process and miss out on their required grades.

Ofqual set out its approach for assessments during the pandemic in April – though not the details of the standardisation model. Schools and teachers will provide pupils with a predicted grade for each subject and a ranking within their class.

These predictions are moderated by Ofqual using historical data on outcomes for each centre, or school, previous levels of attainment of students in this school year and the previous one, and the expected national distribution of grades.

The body has acknowledged that, with its approach to results, “there will be students who may have achieved grades which were higher (or lower) than the calculated grades they will receive this summer, if the exams had taken place”.

The government is set to announce that students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be able to use their mock exam results as final grades if they are better than the modelled grades.