The former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has admitted that
“The whole business of scrapping exams was damaging and must have been bitterly disappointing” to students
Giving evidence to the COVID Inquiry he admitted that Ofqual’s alternative grading system “plainly let down a lot of kids”,
Johnson hit back at the questioning saying @You try coming up with a system to give a fair exam result when they can’t sit exams. It’s not easy, ok,”
The current stage of the Inquiry is investigating the pandemic’s impact on children and the Johnson government’s decision to close schools.
Earlier he had said that closing schools in March 2020 was nightmare idea” and a “personal horror”, but that it felt unavoidable at the time
Johnson expressed “surprise” that the Department for Education didn’t feel it was necessary to prepare contingency plans for the possibility of school closures without a specific directive from No. 10.
Indeed WhatsApp messages released by the Inquiry showed that the former prime minister was “thinking of going into Number 10 and firing people”.
During the summer of 2020, Teachers were asked to supply estimated grades and rankings of pupils in comparison to their peers before an algorithm was used to finalise results.
However grades were approximately 40 per cent lower than teachers’ assessments when the results were revealed
