Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham spoke to Schools Week following the release of GCSE results this week.
Here’s what he had to say in response to our questions…
Q: There’s been a slight increase in in top grades on last year. Does that mean that standards have improved, or is that something around how grading has worked this year?
A: I think it’s important to remember that the differences that we’re talking about here statistically are very, very small and you’ll recall that we made that we made a grading adjustment, a deliberate grading adjustment, across three subjects: French, German and computing.
If you take those three changes out of the averages for this year, you’ve actually got a very slight negative on last year, but it’s so slight as to be statistically insignificant.
So what we what we see this year in terms of results, is a picture which is extremely close to last year.
Q: Should we be comparing these results to 2019 given it was last pre pandemic year?
A: I think what it’s helpful to do is compare the grading standard with 2019.
What senior examiners recognise as the standard needed to get a grade this year has held against last year, and for the purposes of senior examiner judgment, is indistinguishable from the standard we had before the pandemic, 2019 and the years leading up to 2019.
Q: So it is fair, do you think to compare to 2019?
A: Yes, during the pandemic period, we had a different grading standard because we had no external assessment.
So as you’ll recall, we had to rely on a teacher judgment, and they bring a wide range of risks of bias and the lack of exactitude that you get from an external national measure.
But if I’m a student today collecting my results, and I’ve got half a dozen grade sevens or grade eight or grade sixes, that student can be confident that if senior examiners looked at the work that produced those grades and compared it with the work that was needed to produce those grades in 2019 they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
It’s the same standard of work. They are directly comparable.
Q: I know you don’t like the phrase comparable outcomes, but talk me through how that has been applied this year.
A: So, the only reason why I resist the term comparable outcomes for wider communication is because people understand the word outcome to mean results. And they think what we’re talking about is the same proportion of each grade, the same proportion of results.
That has never been what comparable outcomes indicate, but that’s how it is sometimes accidentally misunderstood.
What we’re really talking about is a comparable standard of work.
So maintaining standards is about ensuring that the pattern of grades that we see, the relationship between the pattern of grades and the underlying standard of work remains a constant relationship over time, and you can’t get more grades for less good work over time.
That’s what we’re preventing… That has absolutely been applied this year.
Q: The national reference test this year showed the lowest performance in English on record. What is the evidence to back up the increase in top grades?
A: Since the pandemic, since normal standards were re-established last year, we’ve got two years of NRT evidence, 2023 and 2024. Compared with 2023 in English at grades four and five, we’ve got a very small decline.
So we don’t know yet whether that is going to turn into a trend in English at that level four and five, it’s too early to say that because, actually, from 2022 to 2023 the line was more or less flat at grades four and five in English.
It did dip down a little bit this year, but if we’re looking at the period from the pandemic going forward, if we were going to make any adjustment in grading standards, we would need a more sustained period of convincing evidence to establish whether or not this was really a trend since the pandemic.
But let me just be clear, an adjustment to the grading standard is not the same as an adjustment to the proportion of people getting the grade.
Q: You spoke last week about using 2023 as the new baseline – does that apply to GCSEs as well?
A: What I said last week was that we have a performance standard. So, in other words…what standards you need to get a grade, which is constant between 2023 and 2024 and indistinguishable as a performance standard from the standard required for each grade prior to the pandemic.
We don’t ration grades, so we don’t set a proportion of grades that is or is not allowed each year. What we do is set a performance standard that has to be met, a quality of work that has to be met.
There will be variation in the numbers meeting that bar, but we don’t ration the number of people getting it, so you will see variations in the proportions of people getting a grade. But that’s different to the performance standard itself.
Q: Talk me through the regulatory work that Ofqual has taken in relation to these results.
A: We work very closely with the exam boards as they evaluate exam papers each year, so we monitor the work they do.
We sample grading meetings to make sure that grading meetings are setting appropriate standards that maintain the standard year on year, [and] we look at their outcomes data to check for any signs of implausibility in their grading.
If we have questions, if there are patterns that may not look right, we ask them to provide us with further evidence, and we do that across all subjects at both A-level and GCSE and, of course, AS-level, although that’s a relatively small qualification.”
Q: What is the wider work that Ofqual does throughout the year?
A: In terms of wider regulatory work, quite a lot. We recognise awarding bodies, we accredit new specifications, we look at plans that exam boards and awarding organisations have for new qualifications, reforms or novel approaches to assessment or grading.
If they’re going to be considering redesigning question papers, we would provide feedback to them on that and offer advice and where necessary challenge.
So [there are] lots and lots of interactions all the time, across the literally hundreds of qualifications that are in scope, not just on the general qualification side, GCSE and A-level…but across all the vocational and technical qualifications.
I can assure you that we are never idle. There is always work to do.
Q: On French and German, the stated aim of the regulatory work that you did was to better align them Spanish – but top grades in those subjects have been pushed further away from Spanish. Was that supposed to happen?
A: We’ve got to distinguish between two conceptually different things here. The first one is the standard of work required to get a grade [and] the second one is how many people get the grade.
What we have adjusted is the standard needed to get the grade. What you see in the proportions getting the grade is conditioned by who does it and how well they do.
So it may be, for example, that the cohort taking Spanish is a less well performing cohort than the cohort taking German overall, in which case you would expect to see lower grades in Spanish than German, even though the grading standard is the same.
We’ve got aligned grading standards across French, German and Spanish, so to get your grade 7 German is just as difficult as getting a grade 7 in Spanish or in French.
But of course, if I put five students through that standard … they will come out with different grades because they’re different students and will have performed differently on the day.
But that doesn’t mean the grading standard is not level across the three. How well students perform against that grading standard depends on who the student is and how well they tackle the exam questions on the day.
