Conventional wisdom has it that, following three years of COVID-generated disruption, school exams in England have finally returned to pre-pandemic norms. In many important ways this is perfectly true: traditional written exams are back, so the system no longer has to rely on centre- or teacher-assessed grades. And although some special support has remained in place for pupils affected by COVID, the grade inflation seen in 2020-2022 has gone and grade distributions look much like they did before COVID struck.
Or do they? As pointed out by Duncan Baldwin in an opinion piece in Schools Week, there have been early signs that more pupils than usual are getting no grades at all in key subjects. This can be for a variety of reasons, from performing badly in the exam to not turning up or not being entered at all. Here we use the recently released 2023 GCSE results data to investigate this issue further.
Figure 1 shows the distributions of GCSE grades for 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), 2022 (the next year for which school-level data are available) and 2023 (the current, supposedly back-to-normal year). In both Mathematics and English Language, we can see that high grades (in purple and blue) grew as a proportion in 2022 before falling back again in 2023 to more or less the same as levels as in 2019. Lower grades (in yellow and green) did the opposite, shrinking in 2022 before rising back to pre-pandemic levels in 2023.
But take a closer look at the very bottom of the graph, where the grey, and red layers indicate pupils who didn't obtain a grade at all and you'll see a different trend. For these, recent years have shown only increases, with no return yet to pre-pandemic norms.
