Ofqual’s guidance U-turn shows how broken the education system is

Editorial: If there are problems this week with GCSE results, as seems likely, Gavin Williamson’s job could become untenable

The chaos over the A-Level exam results was profoundly predictable and all the more depressing for that. It is monstrously unfair for the students who have found that their hard work is downgraded by a computer program. It is even more absurd that a known problem – the difficulties that come with using information from mock exams to create a fair assessment of ability – should be first ignored, then met by the quick and inadequate response of downgrading more than one-third of the results.

The students who protested against this absurdity are right to be angry. But so too are the much larger numbers of young people who have not made public protests, but fear that their life chances have been damaged by government incompetence. No one can choose the moment at which they are born, go to and leave school, go to university. So school-leavers this year have been exceptionally unlucky. They have potentially missed graduation assemblies. They face the prospect of not being able to enjoy the full undergraduate experience if they start their courses this year. And the unsettling economic background hangs over one of the most important transitions of anyone’s life – the move out of secondary education to whatever lies beyond.