2020: The year that Ofqual’s “comparable outcomes” system ran into the ground?

Does the government’s reported extraordinary last-minute change to the way this year’s A-level grades are awarded spell disaster, this year at least, for the carefully-calibrated statistical system through which England’s exams regulator has controversially attempted to combat “grade inflation”?

The question suggests itself after the Guardian reported a staggering move by ministers which would see students in England given the right to substitute results they had received in their mock exams earlier in the year if they were unhappy with those awarded to them by the exam boards.

The reported intervention emerged less than 36 hours before students are due to receive their results from the boards, and with the Scottish government having been forced to re-instate 124,000 downgraded results north of the border.

This seems likely to be widely viewed as a chaotic development, with the leader of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) – a union which often sounds cautious in any criticism of government – stating that the move “beggared belief”.

Geoff Barton, ASCL’s general secretary, said: “The idea of introducing at the 11^th hour a system in which mock exam results trump calculated grades beggars belief. If the government wanted to change the system, it should have spent at least a few days discussing the options rather than rushing out a panicked and chaotic response.”