The Education Secretary is urged to make a statement to MPs after head teachers threaten legal action over grade boundary changes.
Education Secretary Michael Gove has said he will not overrule the exam watchdog’s decision not to re-mark GCSE papers in a row over changes to grade boundaries.
During the academic year, grades were changed halfway throw which annoyed lots of students because they haven’t got a grade they were expecting. Lots of schools and colleges are upset about this decision that Ofqual has took to grade students down.
Many students have not received the grade that they were expecting due to the change within off calls decision to change the boundary of grading GCSE exams.
Teaching unions have threatened legal action over the issue and claim thousands of teenagers who were expected to obtain a C grade pass in English were awarded a D grade after the grade boundary was raised last minute.
He said he had “enormous sympathy” with the pupils who sat GCSEs this summer, but he refused to intervene to order Ofqual to regrade the papers.
“I cannot and should not do that. Ofqual, the regulator, is independent. If I start telling them what to do they are no longer independent and exams are no longer robust,” he told Sky News.
He said: “I have enormous sympathy with the students who worked so hard, with parents who feel disappointed and also with teachers who put an enormous amount of effort in to make sure that young people can do as well as possible”.
“The problem is that the GCSE examination is not designed appropriately. It is split up into units and modules and too many resits and retakes”.
“What we needed to do is to have a new examination in which everyone sits the exam at the same time – and that examination makes sure that people develop a proper understanding of English language and a proper love of English literature, and we propose changes to these exams.”
The GCSE grade boundaries in January differed to those set in June
Head teachers claim that GCSE exams were at disadvantage over those who sat them earlier in the year in January.Ofqual was asked to investigate and acknowledged in its report into the GCSE English crisis that January’s assessments had different criteria for marking compared with the June assessment.Rejected students can resits their exams in November.
Recently, the Labour’s education spokesman Stephen Twigg had an interview on Sky News.
He said: “We expect him to come to Parliament and to set out what’s going to happen because there is a basic unfairness here. If you were assessed in January you could get a grade C. The same quality of work, maybe even slightly better work, assessed in May and you would have got a D. That cannot be right.
“I’m all in favour of rigour, I’m in favour of making sure these are tough exams, but you can’t change the boundaries in the middle of the year”.
“We need a full inquiry into what went wrong, we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again next year, which is why I have suggested the select committee on education should take a detailed look at that”.
“But before then, we need to try and avert there being legal action… let’s try to resolve this in the next few days”.
“I think the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, should be calling Ofqual and the exam boards in to try to sort this out so that these young people aren’t at a disadvantage.”
But now the Deputy Prime Minister is glad-handing at a London school, side-by-side with Education Secretary Michael Gove, to mark the official policy announcement.
After weeks of controversial discussions in The House of Common what has changed with GCSE exams?
Daily mail has obtained some controversial GCSEs exam plan and Mr Gove went into meetings to discuss this matter and came up with a compromise.
Meanwhile, Mr Clegg’s right-hand man, David Laws, has been promoted to the Department of Education where he can keep an eye on Mr Gove.
The Lib Dems have secured two key concessions. First, there is more time for schools to prepare because the changes will not be implemented until 2015.
Secondly – and most importantly for Mr Clegg – there will not be a “two-tier system”.
Whether that is that the end of the story? I’m not sure.
Is it really realistic that a single exam paper can cater for children of all abilities – stretching the very brightest while giving the less able a chance?
How about students with learning disabilities, disruptive home lives, or those for whom English is a second language?
If they fail the exam, will they simply leave education without any qualifications at all?
There is a telling quote from a source in the Mail On Sunday: “Gove is determined to ensure it is much more demanding than the existing exam. Schools will be given time to raise their game and adjust to that”.
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