Clearly I am not the only one who's baffled as to how the government got into this terrible Ofqual-sized mess over A levels.
The fatal error was to scrap exams. Not all countries did this; so did the secretary of state ask enough questions of his civil servants about the problems this would cause? Although there would have been validity issues raised by this decision, they would have been easier to deal with than having to fall back onto a flawed algorithm. And schools would have had increased incentive to do some teaching.
There were 12 such models, I read; the one they used may have been the least worst, but it was still dire. Ofqual knew it was flawed but inexplicably did nothing (it seems) to fix the problems they had caused. Why were grades not moderated when it was seen that certain cohorts were being so egregiously disadvantaged? What were they doing all those weeks?
The decision to allow mock exam grades to count shows that there is no one left inside the DfE who know how secondary schools actually function; anyone who did would have known that the inter-school reliability of mock exams is vanishingly low.
The policy to cling on (for a week) to the wreck of a shattered policy as the storm raged around them also illustrates that no one inside the DfE understands young people. Did they really imagine that all those youngsters who've been getting used to being on the streets every month protesting about inactivity on climate change would just stay at home and re-plan their broken futures?
But then, DfE ministers have spent more than a year ignoring all those street protests. What a pity in every sense they'd not paid more attention.
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