What next for students left high and dry after A-level grading U-turn?

It was a shame to see the U-turn on exam grading being weaponised almost as soon as the announcement was made. Political point-scoring aside, people are complaining that there are unfairnesses in using Centre Assessed grades (CAGs) with statistics being rolled out already showing who has missed out more or less compared with the formerly evil algorithm.

The truth is that both the algorithm and the CAG awards have considerable weaknesses – not surprising when young people didn’t actually sit any exams this year. Many people have forgotten that actual exams also produce random results, but at least there’s an exam script to support the grade awarded.

It would be good if people stopped analysing the imperfections in this imperfect assessment year and concentrated instead on mitigating the continuing disruption and uncertainty for young people’s progression.

Gavin Williamson seems to think that this is a simple matter but it presents a formidable challenge for the university sector. In a “normal” year, the process of enrolling a cohort of undergraduates is an extraordinarily complex undertaking with universities simultaneously serving students’ best interests, their own recruitment and financial targets, the vagaries of exam outcomes and the constant balancing of quality and quantity. And all under the watchful eye of the regulator, ready to hold them to account if the diversity or the outcomes of their student intake fail to meet benchmarks. 

The part that exam grades play in this balancing act is considerable.  Exam grades do, after all, provide the underlying rationale for believing that a student will succeed on that course at that university.  So when the link between exam grades and students’ potential to succeed is weakened there is a problem. 

This difficult position for universities is now exacerbated because, having done their best to run an efficient confirmation and clearing peak after the first set of dodgy results, they now have to run, in effect, another confirmation and clearing process based on a second set of results five days later. Vice-chancellors and admissions professionals will be pulling out what remains of their hair.

Many students will have already been accepted to their first choice of university. It’s the ones who were rejected by their first choice and elected to accept either their second (insurance) choice or go into clearing who present the problem – as of Tuesday, about 57,000 students. 

If these students now appear to have met the conditions, their first choice would normally be contractually obliged to accept them.  Some universities simply won’t be able to meet that obligation because they responded to exhortations from the Secretary of State and exercised leniency in accepting candidates who missed their grades first time round and are now full to capacity.

Those that still have capacity to accept students who, on the second grading, now meet the conditions for their place will of course try to process these as quickly as possible so that students know where they stand. This will also mean some universities losing students they thought they had secured in the first round.

The removal of the temporary recruitment cap will create some headroom in higher tariff universities that appeared to be filling up quickly last week, but this creates risks that medium and lower tariff universities will lose more students than they will gain.

It remains to be seen whether the significant grade inflation inherent in the CAG results will be distributed evenly enough to increase demand across the sector. All quite a roller coaster.

I have every confidence that my former colleagues at Ucas and professionals in admissions offices around the country will be doing all they can to respond to the huge task that confronts them. Many will have spent months preparing for the massive operation that confirmation and clearing represents, only to find that they need to do it all over again a few days later. It will be heavy lifting indeed.

A few things are needed right now. First, considered messaging from ministers, schools and universities that this will not be sorted out overnight. It will take days, weeks maybe, for this unprecedented second round of confirmation and clearing to be processed, and students’ expectations need to be managed. Second, for those students who can only be offered a deferred place at their first choice university because of capacity constraints, it would help if there were a package of financial and other support measures available given that finding work for the intervening year might be difficult. 

There are ways to ensure that a Covid-enforced gap year could be valuable and meaningful for the unfortunate students caught in this situation. I have in mind volunteering opportunities, coding and data science boot camps, paid internships and the like. It would be crying shame if aspiring students were left to atrophy on the couch watching Netflix on benefits for the next year.

Finally, it would be welcomed if ministers could take on board just how much has been asked of and delivered by universities this year. 

Universities are in a position to help the government ensure that more young people are undertaking higher education at a time when this is possibly the most appropriate activity in their Covid-ravaged futures. This is not the time to continue the recent rhetoric that appears to want to curb the number of people going to university or to get hung up on so-called “low value” courses.

To my mind, going to university this year is the right choice for young people to ride out the Covid storm and transform their life opportunities, as it is in any other year.

Mary Curnock Cook is the former chief executive of Ucas.