Duvet Day?

 I wonder how many people woke up this morning with the same first thought as me?

Weirdly, it’s  been a long time since I had that feeling of wanting to pull the duvet over your head, and stay there in the hope that the world could reset to a previous time. You would think that would be a common feeling after grief but that wasn’t how I experienced it. I do think it would have been a more restful option but it wasn’t to be. This morning, however, my first thought wasn’t to jump out of bed and release my mind from it’s free-reign thoughts. It might have been because the world had cooled down (the first night under 20C in a week) and grabbing a duvet to pull over your head was an option but there was also the idea that I could pretend that ‘none of this had ever happened.’ 

I imagine lots of 18 year olds, teachers, parents and, hopefully, Gavin Williamson will want to pull the duvet back over their heads this morning.

I wouldn’t blame a single one of those teenagers whose results were downgraded yesterday if they were hoping for a personal Groundhog Day. You could argue that kids often don’t get their predicted grades but when that happens it’s because they mucked up a paper, got confused by a question, didn’t have enough breakfast to concentrate properly or had hay fever so bad they couldn’t see to write. They could understand it. It still might not have been fair. It still might not have been a test of what they can actually do but it was understandable. If they didn’t understand they could appeal and have the paper re-marked or ask to see it. There has always been an admin cost associated with this, which exam boards refund if they find an error has been made. This year, the decision to downgrade them has been made with the sweep of a pen, or computer mouse to turn them into a statistic that fits an algorithm and the £111 admin fee seems unjustifiable.

The article in the Telegraph that has turned Gavin Williamson’s quotes into the funniest and most unfair misquote of all time (please read the article and not just the funny caption someone has put with the tweet!) tried to explain the thinking.  He said that if they had gone with the teacher’s grades then the overall grades this year would have shot up. This, he thought, would disadvantage the children in the future. That sounds counter-intuitive because surely higher grades would help but he seemed to be saying that people wouldn’t be able to trust those grades. He didn’t say that it would mean that people were promoted into positions they weren’t qualified for, even though that is one logical conclusion of his argument. 

There is an obvious reason why the grades are higher. Teachers were not over-inflating the grades. They just couldn’t decide who would muck it up on the day. Can you imagine that conversation? 

“Well yes, Billy, I know you could have got an A but I was assuming that your hamster died the morning of the exam and you just couldn’t concentrate properly.”

“But Sir, I don’t have a hamster!”

“Oh, Jessica, Jessica, if only you hadn’t got the numbers on the dates the wrong way round you would have got that B in History but everyone knows Hitler didn’t die in April 1954.”

“Miss, I do know it was 1945. I wouldn’t...”

“Well someone would have reversed the numbers, we decided that it would be you this year.”

I don’t know why these kids just couldn’t have been given what their teachers thought they deserved. No one will trust this year’s results anyway. Also, haven’t these children had enough to deal with already? No leaving experience, no chance to take an exam to prove how hard you’ve worked, no prom, no meeting friends, no chance to meet a boyfriend/girlfriend, no opportunity to get drunk in a field and have a grope with someone that you’ll regret later, not much hope for the future, constantly being told you are going to kill granny. I could go on. Wouldn’t high A level grades compensate for that a little?

I know many teachers who agonised for days to get the grades right and provide evidence for every student. I don’t know any teacher who wasn’t aware that over-inflated grades could be marked down. Someone I know said, “The worst thing, is those students looking at you as if you’ve done this to them.”

Parents whose children have been affected will definitely be hoping for a duvet day. It’s hard to be the parent of a sad young person.

I hope the education secretary is also feeling like this. He must know that his days in the job are numbered. The Prime Minister has said that he has every confidence in him, which is code for, ‘start packing your bags mate’.  I’d like to think that his wife, a former primary school teacher, told him what he’d done.

“No, Gav. Don’t be stupid. You’ve undermined the confidence and professionalism of every teacher in the country. I’m absolutely fuming. My friends won’t speak to me. I’ve had this text from Cathy. The things they are calling you. I think you should sleep in the spare room.”

“But Jo, it’s not my fault. It’s Michael’s. Gove was wrong. He should never have got rid of continuous assessment.”

That might be something we can all agree on but it doesn’t make it any easier for someone who feels their life has been altered by a global pandemic and a computer algorithm.