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Poor Gavin Williamson. This year should have been his dream. More British students than ever will go on to university. More than ever will be from disadvantaged backgrounds. And their unexamined A-levels will stand to their credit, with 2% more getting A and A* grades. Pupils everywhere would be pictured “jumping for joy” in the time-honoured newspaper fashion.
But these are facts and facts make poor headlines. Instead all the chickens of Whitehall’s quantification mania have come home to roost. Williamson made the same mistake as did his health colleague Matt Hancock. He left mathematicians in charge of the henhouse. Their algorithm ignored sod’s law of democracy, that losers shout louder than winners. It made a third of all A-level examinees losers – and mob rule predictably broke out.
Other than for league table nerds, the sole usefulness of A-levels is to give an easy ride to university admissions officers. They need not apply any human yardstick or interview, just put applicants in a queue by getting them to tick boxes. One result has been to entrench the hold of elite universities on the “ablest” pupils.
A-levels are full of unfairness. Figures last year from the Higher Education Policy Institute show that while in “objective” subjects like maths, just 4% of marks are different if the papers are re-marked, for more subjective history and English almost half the grades vary. As a result, one in four A-level grades is said to be “wrong”. Most people seem to accept this as the way of the world.
It is now abundantly clear why, in the absence of examinations, the Ofqual regulator this year tried to adjust the preliminary “results” of individual teacher predictions. It had nothing to do with accuracy and everything to do with continuity and tidiness. It was inevitable that this would go haywire. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland got the point and reverted to teacher assessment alone. Williamson in his Whitehall bunker failed to see the same necessity. He must surely do so now, and leave universities to cope with the resulting mess.
On Thursday the government has a chance to make some amends. It is scheduled to publish its “fake” GCSE results for 16-year-olds. It should bin them as pointless. If A-levels are a confidence trick, GCSEs merely relieve schools of their duty of deciding what pupils might beneficially learn. They are about regulatory quantification, incentives, charts and graphs, while reducing pupils to tension, tears and rote-learning. They have become a tribal rite of passage, like confirmation in church.
Education’s high priests have been left chanting the virtue of exams as a regime of discipline, resilience, hard work, mind- and memory-training. Justifications for examinations are like the past reasons for corporal punishment, “good enough for me so it’s good enough for them”. Treating pupils as a cross between sheepdogs and monastery novices has zero relevance to real life. As it is, this year could have been an opportunity to test some alternative to Dickens’ Gradgrind system of measuring “little vessels” with “gallons of facts”. We could have tried a different more humanistic system, liberating schools from the dictatorship of the exam and leaving universities to organise their own admissions.
Instead we are told that an entire age cohort has “had its life wrecked”. I doubt it, but there is one lesson it has learned for sure, never trust an algorithm.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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