The countdown clock is ticking, the panicky last-minute revision reaching feverish levels. No parent currently tiptoeing around snappy, stressed teenagers will need reminding that exam season now looms in England and Wales, or that it’s already under way in Scotland. But if nerves are jangling more than usual this year, both in staff rooms and at home, that’s hardly surprising.
After three years of pandemic grade inflation, caused first by teachers having to conjure up grades and then by exam boards making understandable allowances for what children had been through, this is the year that exam regulator Ofqual finally plans to ratchet GCSE and A-level grades back down to normal (though with some leeway on the borderline). The trouble is that in many schools, normal still feels a very long way off.
The teenagers currently hunched over their revision flashcards have endured years of adults moving the goalposts; shunting them in and out of lockdown, chopping and changing arrangements for exams, promising help to catch up and not quite delivering. Having balked at the £15bn cost of the recommendations of its own “catchup tsar”, Kevan Collins, Boris Johnson’s government sought to fix things on the cheap – but even then, it turns out that a third of the money allocated to its national tutoring programme for extra lessons hasn’t been drawn down. (Heads complain that the platform was difficult to use, didn’t meet their needs or that they couldn’t afford it, with costs part-subsidised by government and schools making up the difference.)
