Leading Article: Victims of the snow

The real victims of the snow chaos which has hit this month's exam season are the youngsters from last summer who wanted to resit their A-level exams in the hope of improving their grades to secure a university place this summer.

They do not have the opportunity to delay their resits until the summer as the syllabus has changed and January represented their last chance of improving their circumstances. Ofqual, the exams watchdog, and the exam boards have said that anybody who could not attend an exam centre because of severe weather disruption could apply to receive special consideration. It is difficult, though, to see how special consideration can work in this case as the students concerned are trying to better their previous results. It would seem to be difficult for any examiner to consider whether a student would or would not have done better at a second attempt.

This state of affairs lends credence to the call by the parents' campaigner Margaret Morrissey for these examinations to be postponed so that pupils can sit them again.

After all, as a result of the recession, there has been an increase in the number of applications for university places over the last two autumns. Therefore it is more crucial than ever to students' futures that they obtain the highest qualifications they can.

Having said that, we believe that examiners should look leniently on cases for special consideration where students arrived late or had an immense struggle to get through the snow to reach their centres. After all, that is hardly the best preparation for an important exam and as one sixth-form college principal said earlier this week: "Students seem more stressed about their exams."

Finally, a word of praise is due to all those who adopted the Dunkirk spirit in the past weeks – schools that hired 4x4s to ferry pupils in snowbound villages to school, and mums and dads who turned up to clear the snow from school grounds. In most cases, their efforts were not in vain.