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Ofqual chief: Schools don’t need another ‘big assessment experiment’

Dr Jo Saxton said she is not a' grade inflation warrior' but wants 'fairest' qualifications for students

Dr Jo Saxton said she is not a' grade inflation warrior' but wants 'fairest' qualifications for students

Schools don’t need another “big assessment experiment”, Ofqual’s chief regulator has said as she justifies the move back to pre-pandemic grading in summer 2023.

However the regulator and ministers announced today that while grades will return to 2019 levels, there will be similar “protections” to those used in 2017 to ensure the first cohorts taking reform exams were not disadvantaged.

Ofqual said this would mean a typical student who would have achieved an A before the pandemic will be just as likely to achieve an A next summer, even if their performance is “a little weaker” than pre-Covid.

Dr Jo Saxton told Schools Week the “soft-landing” was fair because of Covid disruption. It will “guard against” overall results being lower than 2019.

But the sector should expect a complete return to normal for 2024 exams after four years of changes to the exams process, she said.

“[The 2017 protection] was one of the reasons the Ofqual board and I felt this was the right thing to do, because what the nation doesn’t need is another big assessment experiment,” Saxton said.

“It was important to find a way of protecting students who are coming out the other side of the pandemic, but in a way that was secure.”

Saxton said “big experiments” such as grading midway between 2019 and 2021 this summer and advance information were taken in the interest of students.

But she added she was “never keen” to do another midpoint between years in 2022-23 because of how “technically challenging delivering it was”.

Advance information – a revision aid that had mixed reviews on usefulness last year – has also been scrapped by the Department for Education. But formulae and equation sheets will be in place for GCSE maths, physics and combined science.

‘I shouldn’t have said midpoint’

Some popular A-level subjects had a far smaller declines in top grades than others earlier this year, meaning some were noway near the promised “midpoint”.

Saxton said one thing she would have done differently was not use the “midpoint” term as it was just a “staging post” rather than an exact figure.

“Yes, you can split hairs about what was high and what was lower than the technical midpoint but we absolutely delivered a staging post approach.”

She added: “I’m no grade inflation warrior, what matters to me is that students have qualifications which are the fairest possible indication of what they know and can do.”

No plans have been published for 2023-24 yet, but Saxton said they will “keep an eye” on the pandemic.

But “all things begin equal”, she hopes “very much that we wouldn’t need it next year and there’s sort of no announcement necessary”.

An Ofqual evaluation into the use of advance information is ongoing.

Saxton said students told her how they “really like the idea” of advance information but “very many of them found the reality of it difficult to use”.

She added: “I’m just really struck by how many students said, ‘you know miss, what I really want is just to be in my classroom with my teacher’. They just want consistent normal teaching and learning not another set of documents to have to try to interpret.”

A series of mistakes were made in exam papers and advance information this year, with the then education secretary James Cleverly condemning it as “unacceptable”.

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