As students receive their GCSE results on Thursday, much of the discussion will focus on the fact that they are significantly lower than last year, but this was very much expected. After the use of teacher- and centre-assessed grades in 2020 and 2021 inflated grades substantially, the qualifications regulator, Ofqual, began a two-year process to return grades to where they had been pre-pandemic.
Some students will inevitably be asking if this is fair, given the level of disruption that they have experienced in their education. This is one of those situations in which there was no perfect solution to address the big increases in grades.
But we believe the approach adopted to try to return things to normal was ultimately reasonable and pragmatic.
Headline figures show the proportion of entries from 16-year-olds in England awarded a grade 4 or above is down from 79% at the peak and 75% last year to 70% today, and the proportion getting the higher grades (grade 7 and above), which peaked at 30% in 2021 and was 27% last year, has fallen to 22% this year. While these percentages sound large, it represents a change in the average GCSE grade change of just one-third across all entries since last year.
But the changes in grades this year have not been equal across subjects. Some subjects required bigger drops to return to something like the 2019 distribution. Subjects with smaller numbers of candidates had particularly large rises over 2020 and 2021 and so have seen the largest falls this year. The percentage of candidates receiving top grades (7 and above) in subjects such as computing, music and PE have fallen by about 10 percentage points compared with last year.
While grades have returned to normal, the schooling experience of pupils picking up their results today has been anything but. They faced periods of school closure and remote learning while they were in years 8 and 9, and additional disruption has been caused by industrial action over the past year. Pupils in this cohort, along with other older pupils, also appear to have found it difficult to return to school consistently after the pandemic, with significant increases in pupil absence and, most worryingly, persistent absence.
