‘Better late than never’: Students frustrated and elated over A-level U-turn

‘They put a lot of time and effort into this rubbish algorithm, which has been a monumental failure, to just literally give us what the teachers predicted us anyway’

A-level students successfully protest outside the Department of Education (Reuters/Henry Nicholls)

Students have expressed both joy and frustration at the government’s decision to allow predicted grades to inform their results.

Thousands of young people across the country were left with their plans for the future dashed after being downgraded by an algorithm which appeared to particularly impact high achieving students at lower-performing schools.

However, after the government announced it would allow the grades decided upon by teachers to stand – a decision that followed days of protests from pupils – many have expressed mixed feelings at the episode.

Before the change was announced by government qualification body Ofqual and education secretary Gavin Williamson, 18-year-old Alaa Muhammad wrote an emotional plea to the minister.

“I deserve to know why you have ruined my chance at life. Why I don’t feel like living anymore. Why I feel like all my hard work and money has gone to waste,” she wrote in the widely shared tweet after her predicted ABB grade was downgraded to an EDD.

However, the teenager from southeast England, who paid more than £2,000 to take resits at a private college after her studies in year 12 and 13 were disrupted, has said she will now achieve her dream of studying medicine in Pakistan.

“I am ecstatic, I am so so happy. I was so hopeless a couple of days ago and now I feel like I can finally breathe again”, she said.

But with the joy also came frustration for some – with the question of how universities will approach over-subscribed and competitive courses still in question at a time learning establishments will still have to implement social distancing.

“I’m much more pleased now I have got my centre-assessed grades. It’s just dependent now on whether my places have been held,” Thomas Jukes, 18, from Great Barr in Birmingham said after missing out on a place to study medicine at the University of Birmingham.

“If they managed to turn around in four days and say, ‘well, you can just have your centre-assessed grades’, it wouldn’t have been that much hassle in the first place, would it?

“I think they put a lot of time and effort into this rubbish algorithm, which has been a monumental failure, to just literally give us what the teachers predicted us anyway.”

Meanwhile 18-year-old Jess Johnson, who won an Orwell Youth Prize for a piece of fiction that saw an algorithm sort students into bands based on class, said she felt she had “fallen into my own story”.

“I wrote about it because I saw the educational inequality in the UK was there, but now it’s physically being enforced by an algorithm,” she said after her grades had meant she would miss out on a £16,000 scholarship.

The student of Ashton Sixth Form College in Greater Manchester has since received the A in English she will need to meet the term of her offer from St Andrews.

“I’m very excited about that, I’m glad they made the change,” she said. “I think it would have been unfair if [Northern] Ireland, Scotland and Wales made the change and we didn’t, so I’m very glad.”

Students had protested against the system across the weekend and into Monday – chanting “f**k the algorithm” outside the Department for Education in one segment of footage.

“To see them make a change makes me feel good to see the power of the youth”, said Fawad Sajid, who described the U-turn as “a bit late but better late than never”.

He added: “For the greater good, this change is definitely a step in the right direction but I still feel there needs to be a process in which students can appeal against their teachers’s [assessed grade].

“Some students will naturally feel that having that assessment is not fair either. These appeals need to be treated on a case-by-case basis.

“We have been out here for three days protesting and we only got our results on Thursday.”

Additional reporting by PA