Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi says pupils WILL sit A-Level and GCSE exams this summer

GCSE and A-Level exams will go ahead in the summer but results will feature some teacher assessed grades, he education secretary said today.

Nadhim Zahawi said that students would sit papers after they were cancelled in 2021 for the second year in a row.

But he ruled out an immediate return to the pre-Covid grading system, saying ‘we recognise that those students sitting their GCSEs or A-Levels have had their education disrupted’.

He promised more information would be released in a month’s time, detailing how the summer exam season would pan out, but insisted booster jabs would allow the exams to be sat in person.

He told Sky News: ‘We are going further and working with Ofqual to say ”we do want to go back to pre-covid grading and the robustness of the grading system”, but we are going to do it in two steps.

‘We are going to go to the medium between the teacher assessment and the pre-Covid for this summer,  and then we will go to pre-Covid grading the year after.’

Last year students had to rely solely on teacher-assed grades after Mr Zahawi’s predecessor Gavin Williamson axed in person exams, sparking a row over grade inflation.

Students have faced two years of interrupted education and fiascos over whether exams could be sat and how they would be graded 

Today’s remarks echoed those made by Mr Williamson last year that while pupils could sit exams in 2022 there would be ‘adjustments and mitigations’ to ensure fairness to students now in Years 10 and 12, and said he was not expecting an immediate return to exams resembling those pre-pandemic.

Last year’s teacher-graded exams led to accusations that fee-paying institutions were gaming the A-level system that handed teachers the power to grade their pupils with barely any moderation.

It was revealed last summer that 70.1 per cent of teenagers at fee-paying schools received an A or A* in a subject in 2021 – compared to around 35 per cent in council-run comprehensives.

Education campaigners have said the pandemic has ‘compounded’ inequality in schools, especially for those in poorer areas, and there are also signs that middle class children in sixth-form colleges and grammar schools are falling further behind private school counterparts.

Almost half of all A-level students gainws an A* or A grade from their teachers last summer – a new record. 

And only one in five of any A-level results were scrutinised by exam boards, with even fewer disputed by Ofqual who said they was happy to ‘trust teachers’.

In total 44.8 per cent of UK entries to a subject were awarded an A or A* grade – up by 6.3 per cent on 2020 when 38.5 per cent achieved it – and one in five of all results was an A* this year, another record. 

It means that the number of top grades handed out has almost doubled in the two years since students last sat exams in 2019, when 25.2 per cent got an A or an A*.

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi accepted more school staff will end up off work isolating for coronavirus as case rates rise when pupils return.

He told the BBC’s Sunday Morning show that staff absenteeism was at about 8.5 per cent last week but ‘will increase, no doubt, because now schools are back we’re going to see an increase in infection rates’.

Mr Zahawi said he was making contingency plans for rising rates of staff being off, saying some schools have had up to 40 per cent absent but remained open.

‘I have to have contingency plans for 10, 15, 20, 25 per centabsenteeism because Omicron is far more infectious,’ he added.