Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson was warned that the A-level and GCSE grading algorithms may fail and could lead to hundreds of thousands of students obtaining the wrong results, The Times reported, citing a senior source at the Department for Education.
The government source revealed, as cited by the edition, that Williamson had received a letter from Sir Jon Coles, a former director-general there, setting out all the major concerns about Ofqual's grading system.
According to him, the model yields results with a maximum of 75 percent accuracy, which implies that hundreds of thousands of pupils may get the wrong grades. Incidentally, Ofqual's own tests on the algorithm, which were published last week, found that it was 60 percent accurate.
Sir Jon raised separate concerns about using teachers' predicted grades for small groups while continuing to apply the general system to larger groups – a practice that benefits private schools more than state institutions.
Williamson reportedly held a video conference with Coles in mid-July about the aforementioned concerns, but is said to have gone ahead with the algorithm amid worries about grade inflation and the risk that results could be significantly delayed, purportedly having been reassured by Ofqual, the exam regulator for England. Sir Jon, who helped to set up Ofqual during his years at the Department for Education, did not respond to The Times' requests for comment.
The report that these concerns were raised with Williamson weeks ago contradicts his claim that the full scale of the problem with the grading system became clear only over the weekend.
Although he told The Times on Friday that there would be "no U-turn" stressing that abandoning the algorithm in favour of teachers' subjective assessments would risk "rampant grade inflation", he abandoned the algorithm on Monday for the said teachers' predictions, apologising to pupils, parents, and schools.
"Over the weekend it became clearer to me the number of students who were getting grades that frankly they shouldn't have been getting", he said, sparking loads of criticism and multiple calls for his resignation.
The Education Select Committee also raised concerns about the grading system in a 11 July report warning that some pupils risked being "systematically disadvantaged by calculated grades". He also admitted that it was Ofqual's decision to ditch the moderated A-level grades and move on to teacher assessments.
The government's next challenge over exams at the end of compulsory school education will come today when the number of pupils passing their GCSEs is set to shoot to 80 percent, according to a YouGov study. Pupils will be given unmodified teacher assessments. Over the past few years, just under a third of pupils have failed their GCSEs, getting lower than a C under the old grading system, or below a 4 in the reformed academic qualification, introduced in 2017.
