A Level Results 2020 | Highcliffe School

A Level Results 2020


Today our focus is on helping all our Year 13 students, including the majority who were pleased and relieved by their final grades as well as those disappointed by them, come to terms with receiving Exam Board-determined A Level and BTEC results which they themselves were unable to influence by sitting their actual exams in the summer. My message to students is: we’re proud of you all and optimistic about your futures because we know what you are really capable of and how hard you’ve worked. 

Many are struggling to understand why any of their grades were arbitrarily downgraded by an Exam board when the standard of their work over two years, including their mock exams, was clearly much higher. Students who really improved academically from their GCSE results during their time in our Sixth Form seem particularly affected by the algorithm, as though the Boards failed to understand students can and do improve over time. Subjects which had improved massively and were genuinely achieving much higher standards this year have also been arbitrarily penalised and downgraded. To staff and students affected by this I can only offer my sympathy, as the government seem intent on ignoring improvement in standards.

Understandably several comments today from students, parents and staff have been about the Board process for awarding final grades. Most have focused on whether young people in England may have been treated differently and less even-handedly than their peers in Scotland were earlier in the week, or why so much weight seems to have been given by the Boards in their decision on students’ final grades to an impersonal mathematical algorithm – clearly flawed once applied down at the level of individual subject or student grades - rather than our teachers’ rigorous professional assessment of two years’ worth of work by each student.    

 Patrick Earnshaw 

 Headteacher


    Owned by: | Last Published: 13/08/2020 10:52:05 | Next Update: N/A


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