Boris Johnson Backs Down on England Exam Grades After Furore
Backlash Forces Boris Johnson Into U-Turn on England Exam Grades
(Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced into a dramatic U-turn over this year’s pandemic-affected exam results after his government agreed to grade English children based on their teachers’ assessments in the face of parent and student outrage.
“When it became apparent there were unfairnesses within the system, it was the right thing to act,” Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said. The cabinet minister, who faced calls to resign over the fiasco, apologized for the “distress” caused by an algorithm-based system that downgraded thousands of results.
He also tried to deflect blame onto the regulator, saying the injustice only became clearer to him over the weekend. But it’s the second change of course in less than a week -- Williamson had already proposed a ‘triple lock’ to stop students getting poor results -- and the episode adds to a series of pandemic-related missteps by the government that are becoming ever harder to shake off.
After being criticized for being slow to go into lockdown, Johnson’s government then struggled to roll out mass virus testing. In May, Johnson’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, was accused of breaking lockdown rules. Johnson backed him but polls showed few people agreed with that judgment.
Unpopular
It left a bad taste in the mouths of voters, fueling a feeling that the same rules didn’t apply to all. The debacle over exams similarly sparked rage at the inequality of an algorithm that treated private schools better than state ones.
“I’m incredibly sorry,” Williamson said on Sky News on Tuesday. “We had every confidence and reassurance we had a system that was both robust and fair.”
A snap YouGov poll on Monday showed 75% thought the government has handled the exam results badly. It also found 40% thought Williamson should resign.
Johnson is unlikely to be able to quickly put all this behind him. In two weeks’ time, schools are supposed to finally reopen after the pandemic lockdown and he cannot afford any more mistakes. How he handles that will affect far more children than the row over exams.
The problem the government faced on exams was that the pandemic meant tests couldn’t go ahead. Yet many countries fared better and avoided the kind of backlash seen in the U.K.
Other Nations
Apart from Sweden, which kept schools running throughout the pandemic, there were disruptions in many major Europeans economies during crunch exam-taking season. But unlike the U.K., many went for the path of least resistance.
In Italy, the high-school leaving exam was simplified, written tests were replaced with a one-hour conversations with the students’ own teachers.
In France, students did not sit their “bac” for the first time since its inception under Napoleon and instead received grades based on prior tests and homework.
German states were split, but overall exams went ahead and some grade inflation was accepted -- with children effectively marked up rather than down.
Algorithm
In the U.K., the regulator Ofqual was asked to find a way of giving children the grades they would have got. But the algorithm it devised saw top students downgraded from the scores predicted by their teachers, while some children were punished for attending a school that had bad results in the past.
To make matters worse, the algorithm meant it was less likely to hurt children in smaller classes, which benefited students at fee-paying schools.
The government came under fire from some Conservative lawmakers, including two ministers. But the decision creates a fresh problem for universities, which had already accepted or rejected students based on the results published last week.
Williamson said later on Monday the cap on the numbers of students that universities are allowed to take will be removed this year. But the Russell Group, which represents leading institutions including Oxford and Cambridge, called for extra government funding to help pay for that.
George Freeman, a Tory member of Parliament and former minister, told Times Radio the government’s handling of exam grading was a “total shambles” and suggested Williamson may lose his job if Johnson re-arranges his cabinet in the fall.
“Ultimately, the prime minister is in charge,” Freeman said. “And I think he will want to take firm control of this and get a grip and show that his government is taking the life chances of a generation of children seriously.”
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