All this talk of grade ‘inflation’ undermines the hard work of teachers and pupils

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With my whole heart I congratulate every student who has received GCSE results. They richly deserve these results. Now we need to halt the language of “inflation”.

The talk of inflated grades suggests that teachers sat around blowing hot air into balloons, making up grades on a whim.

No. Centres approached the process with gravity. We weighed up all the data as well as our detailed knowledge of students.

Our expertise and integrity and their hard work must not be undermined by any toxic rhetoric.

Sarah Raffray MA, NPQH
Headteacher, St Augustine’s Priory

Great expectations

In these times it is perhaps to be expected that every student can have top grades and all can go to university. But, when this leads to them squeezing into the top universities and the rest remaining half empty, isn’t it time to take some account of reality?

Surely universities must be allowed to revise the offers they have made to take account of grade inflation. Or perhaps we should declare other universities to be outstations of those top ones. Then all offers can be honoured and everyone will attend the university of their choice, though not necessarily at the location they were expecting.

John Riseley
Harrogate

Leading by example

If, as it has been reported, Boris Johnson didn’t want his ministerial team to be decided by public opinion, I can support him and agree with him.

But when members of his team have clearly shown an inability to do their jobs (Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson are the best examples) or an unwillingness to stick to the rules the rest of us had to follow (think of Dominic Cummings) then I can’t support the prime minister.

In the course of my own career, I’ve been lucky enough (and maybe smart enough) to have had many managerial and leadership roles. One thing I learned early in my career is that if you duck tough decisions or just think you can tough things out, in the end it never works and you lose the one thing that is perhaps the most important quality of a good manager and leader – that of respect.

I can’t understand why Johnson doesn’t seem to get this, because every day he doesn’t just shows he’s not up the job he has.

Steve Mumby
London

What did you expect?

I read Diana Young’s column, “When I voted Tory last year, I never imagined things would get this bad” with interest at the fact that disillusionment was “writ large” through her comments and her dismay at this government’s performance.

Of course a pandemic could not have been foreseen and it certainly has been a wake-up call for a party that was riding the crest of the Brexit wave at the end of January. Given the stark and dire reality of Covid-19 and I agree with her that largely the government’s response has been found wanting in many areas.

This often comes down to a now misguided notion of Britain’s exceptionalism that every country, large or small on the face of this poor, beleaguered Earth, will queue up to follow our lead.

Still this hubristic rhetoric continues with Gavin Williamson commenting on the BBC that he was now committed to delivering “the world’s best education system”.

I rest my case.

Judith A Daniels
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Please can we have some informed discussion of the ramifications of a five-year fixed-term parliament? I know that eighty Tory turkeys are unlikely to vote for Christmas, but the government has no immediate incentive to do anything other than ride out the storms and act more like the court of Louis XIV than as a modern democracy.

Am I alone and simplistic in thinking the current situation is having a malign effect on the body politic?

Joanna Pallister
Address supplied

A refusal to grow up

In his speech to the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama said: “I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously, that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did. He’s shown no interest in putting in the work, no interest in finding common ground, no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends, no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”

He concluded by saying that Donald Trump “hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t”.

Replace the words “Donald Trump” and “presidency” with “Boris Johnson” and “premiership”, and you have the perfect analysis of the situation in the UK.

John Knowland
Oxford