Gavin Williamson has revealed his plans for next year’s A-level and GCSE cohorts (Students in England to get notice of topics after Covid disruption, 3 December). They do nothing to address the fundamental weakness in our education system, which is the underachievement of disadvantaged pupils compared with those from advantaged backgrounds. The pandemic has widened the differences between the two groups. Pupils in private schools have much better distance-learning provision if they are unable to attend. Advantaged pupils in state schools have access to computers and broadband and to places where they can study at home.
The government’s promise to ensure all pupils have access to distance learning is another broken one. The measures announced – advance warning of topics, taking aids into exams, contingency papers for those suffering any disruption during the exam period – will all favour advantaged pupils.
John Gaskin
Bainton, East Riding of Yorkshire
• The secretary of state is putting forward changes to the 2021 examinations in the vain attempt to make them “fair” despite the inevitable impossibility of doing so given the variations in students’ Covid-related exposure to teaching and learning. The professional associations seem to have accepted this unsatisfactory fudged situation. Do they not have faith in their members’ professional judgments?
Why attempt the impossible and possibly have to U-turn eventually, so creating yet more stress for teachers and students? Why not rely, as in 2020, on moderated teacher assessments, given that universities and colleges have not raised any outcry about teaching the students assessed in that way?
One answer: this rightwing government does not trust teachers and is obsessed with the “GCSE and A-level gold standards” despite a lack of professional consensus on the reliability of externally set, unseen, timed examinations as the sole means of assessing students’ performance.
Prof Colin Richards
Former HM inspector of schools
• Throughout the examination results fiasco earlier this year, the education secretary parroted the same mantra that end-of-course exams are the best system of measuring learning. He frequently added that this view was “widely accepted”. He has never told us why he holds this view or to which evidence he is referring. In fact, there is considerable evidence stretching back 40 years that various forms of continuous assessment and coursework give a better and fairer guide to pupils’ abilities.
At a time when so many pupils have had severely disrupted education and those in deprived areas are likely to have suffered most from lack of continuity, surely it is sensible to let hard evidence take precedence over political dogma. Ever since a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher started denigrating the concept of teacher-assessed coursework, until Michael Gove finally abolished GCSE coursework in 2013, there has been a common thread to such attacks, namely the unfounded myth that teachers cannot be trusted.
Dr Chris Morris
Kidderminster, Worcestershire
• My advice to Gavin Williamson is to adopt a much simpler solution to the exam problems: the examiners should be provided with full details of the pupils’ work programme during the pandemic, showing days at school, days online and days missed altogether. These factors would be taken into account in the final marks.
Robert Nelson
London
