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GCSE and A-level results are expected to be awarded based on predicted grades and teacher assessment after schools were closed and exams cancelled, leading to concerns that black and working-class pupils will be disadvantaged.
Teachers, pupils and parents were left in shock after the government announced that UK schools were to close indefinitely this Friday and summer exams had been scrapped as part of a national effort to slow the spread of coronavirus.
The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, will give more details about what will replace exams on Friday, but it is likely that GCSE and A-level results will be awarded based on predicted grades. He promised an appeal process for pupils who are unhappy with the results they are given, to ensure that the system is as fair as possible.
Experts warned that the changes would disadvantage black, working-class and marginalised students, who are already under-represented in top universities.
Prof Kalwant Bhopal, director of the centre for research in race and education at Birmingham University, said predicted grades were often wrong, to the detriment of some categories of student.
“There’s a lot of evidence to show that there are stereotypes around particular types of students, so their predicted grades are lower, and when they do the exam they do better than their predicted grade,” she said.
“Students who are from white, middle-class, affluent backgrounds will do very well from these predicted grades, especially those from private schools. Their parents would just go to the school and argue the case that ‘My child isn’t a B, they’re an A*’, and the teachers will take that on board. Those students will do better.”
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, agreed: “Predictions are just very, very flaky, and sometimes people game the system. They’re intentionally wrong.”
Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at Exeter University, said evidence had shown that the poorest students receive lower A-level predictions than their more privileged peers. “There are worries the poorest schoolchildren will almost certainly fall further behind those from better off homes while schools are shut, as many will not have the same sort of support or resources.”
Edward, 17, an A-level student in Witney in Oxfordshire, said it would be unfair to base final grades on mock exams as most pupils did not make as much effort as they would for a real exam, and many had improved since.
“If they give us our predicted grades, then that doesn’t seem fair either. My mock results weren’t particularly bad, but I want to prove how well I can do. Some people have sacrificed so much time working towards exams and now we don’t know what will happen.”
The government is in crisis talks with the exam regulator, Ofqual, to come up with the fairest solution. One proposal is that schools will submit predicted grades to Ofqual, which would take into account school feedback and past exam performance. Another proposal has been that some students might be given the option to sit their exam in the autumn if they are unhappy with the grade awarded under the emergency system.
Hillman warned that using predicted grades could lead to the government bailing out some lower-tariff universities already in a precarious financial situation as more selective institutions, including those in the Russell Group, picked up students at their expense. “Universities will look to have the same kinds of financial support other sectors of the economy are receiving from the government,” he said.
On Thursday, Williamson signalled that schools might well be closed for the rest of the academic year, reopening in September. He also fleshed out plans for the emergency skeleton school service, which is expected to be up and running next week once schools close their gates on Friday. He estimated that it would cater for around 10% of pupils, made up those whose parents are key workers in the fight against Covid-19 and vulnerable pupils.
These will not be schools as we know them. “It’s not going to be an educational setting,” Williamson told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, “they’re not going to be teaching the national curriculum, but it’s going to be a safe place for people who are key to combating this virus and keeping the country moving forward.
“In terms of the number of key workers, but also vulnerable children, some of those children who are most at risk, we’d be looking at up to 10% of a roll of a school being eligible in order to do this [stay open] and the best scientific advice has been that that has a good effect in terms of reducing a pandemic and these are safe environments for children to be there.”
Jules White, headteacher of Tanbridge House school, a 1,600-pupil comprehensive in Horsham, West Sussex, said he had written to parents asking whether they were key workers, and was anticipating catering for around 200 children from next Monday, with provision planned for the Easter holiday.
He said his school was currently well set up to cope, with enough teachers in good health to keep the service running and possibly support other schools elsewhere who were struggling to find staff.
The diverging approaches to school closures may stem from the considerable uncertainty around the extent to which children are playing a role in spreading Covid-19.
Children make up a tiny minority of confirmed cases – fewer than 1% of positive tests in China were children under nine. It is probable that a bigger pool are getting infected but only experiencing mild or no symptoms. Among those who have tested positive, nearly 6% developed very serious illness, according to an assessment of 2,000 patients aged under 18 in Wuhan, with under-fives and babies being most at risk.
A significant unknown is how infectious children are, assuming large numbers are getting infected. Early evidence suggests that around 50% of transmission in the pandemic at large has involved asymptomatic people and children could be among this group.
“It seems most plausible to me that they are being infected but are at low risk of developing disease,” said Prof Peter Smith, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “We know that for flu, children are important transmitters of infection, which is the basis for the flu vaccination programme directed at children, but we do not know yet how important they are as transmitters of coronavirus. So closing schools would be based on the assumption that they do make an important contribution to transmission.”
Rates of various illnesses are seen to rise and fall at the start and end of school terms. School holidays were thought to have led to a plateau in the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Also advised hygiene and social distancing measures, such as hand washing and reduced physical contact, just aren’t very effective in a primary school playground setting. So there is the potential for schools to act as a local fountain of infection for the surrounding area.
“Every mother and father knows that when kids go back to school they’re going to get hammered by colds and flus and sore throats,” said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia.
This uncertain science has to be carefully weighed against the certain disruption and cost of school closures, including taking large numbers of doctors and nurses out of the workplace, and unintended consequences such as grandparents, who are among the most vulnerable, taking on childcare and facing greater exposure.
While secondary schools have the scale to adapt, with large numbers of staff, it will be more challenging for primaries, which have a smaller workforce and less flexibility. There is also concern about special schools for children with complex and profound special needs, which are expected to remain open but may struggle as staff go off sick or self-isolate.
“People on the whole are getting the gist of how serious it is, but the school is the bedrock of the community,” said White. “People want to help. We will handle this. It will be OK.”
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