by Rob Cuthbert

SRHE News Editorial, July 2026

Once again, people across the country are anxiously awaiting results after years of effort leading up to the finals. Will their results be good enough to qualify for a favourable place in the next round? Everywhere individual performances are evaluated to decide who should be chosen. Different participants will be suited to different sides, all playing the same game, but in very different ways at different levels. Some sides are underrated, others are up and coming, some are always at the top, others live on fading glories of past exploits. And above it all sits an agency which organises and sets the rules for the competition, but seems immune from and impervious to criticism or public pressure.

Yes, students, schools and universities are waiting for GCSE and A-level results to be announced.

A-level candidates have spent years preparing to put in the best performance they can when it matters. Examination boards are referees, judging performance and applying sanctions as they see fit. For GCSE the sanctions are clear – no grade 4 or better in English and Maths, and it’s a red card for progression to the next round in school or college (unless you can improve to grade 4 or better in a resit) (or unless you can get Donald Trump to call the head of OfQual). For A-levels, universities and colleges are the teams choosing the people they want for next year. Some people would like to give a red card to anyone who has no A-levels. Ofqual are like FIFA, deciding on the rules affecting grade boundaries and whether Very Anxious Reviews (VAR) of results are eligible for appeal.

But GCSEs and A-levels are well ahead of the World Cup in terms of the integrity and credibility of the competition. To understand why, you need to understand how marking and grading works. Marking is not, of course, an exact science, but it can be monitored, moderated and checked to make it as rigorous and fair as possible – which is what happens, by and large. To convert marks to grades you look at whether a mark falls above or below a grade boundary. Grade boundaries are set by Ofqual, which aims to ensure that exams from one year to the next treat each year’s cohort of candidates fairly. This is not an easy task, and during Covid Ofqual relied on what PM Boris Johnson called (wrongly) a ‘mutant algorithm’, producing results which had to be abandoned at the last minute and replaced by centre-assessed grades. The debacle shone fresh light on a long-running problem with grades, which had already been exposed in analyses by independent consultant Dennis Sherwood. In essence, if a mark is close to a grade boundary it might be converted to either the higher or the lower grade. The explanation is set out clearly and in detail in Sherwood’s 2022 book Missing the Mark. Ofqual themselves admit that

“…more than one grade could well be a legitimate reflection of a student’s performance and they would both be a sound estimate of that student’s ability at that point in time based on the available evidence from the assessment they have undertaken.” (Ofqual, 2019).

In other words, if you were close to the borderline your B might have been an A, and both grades might have been regarded by Ofqual as equally ‘sound’. Not much consolation if you got AAB and needed AAA for your chosen university.

In a World Cup penalty shoot-out, you either score or miss. That’s what FIFA say. But Ofqual would say, if you nearly scored, or hit the bar, it might count as either a goal or a miss, depending on the referee. If that had been the World Cup system, FIFA would have had to change it – straight away. But Ofqual, who have known about this problem for more than ten years, have not tackled it. Instead they doubled down. They changed the rules on reviews and appeals, to make it more difficult, and more expensive if unsuccessful, to get A-level scripts re-marked: it was as if VAR had been switched off. They played the man and not the ball in the media, claiming that Sherwood’s analysis was ‘without merit’. And when complaints persisted, critics have sometimes been silenced. Desperation to “maintain public confidence” in the examination system has outweighed  considerations of fairness to individuals within each cohort of candidates, and Dennis Sherwood’s arguments have never been contradicted; there has never been any official rebuttal, and he continues to air them where he can.

It doesn’t take a Donald Trump to jeopardise the credibility of A-level grades. They are already jeopardised by the grading system which Ofqual has established. There are many possible solutions, identified in Sherwood’s book, but none have been taken up, nor (it seems) even considered. The powers that be prefer to maintain public confidence in a flawed and unfair system, rather than change it to make it fairer. As GCSE and A-level results days approach, most people will once again believe that it is their performance that matters. But in fact one in four grades will be wrong, and “on average, about one “wrong” grade is “awarded” to every candidate in the land. With no right of appeal.” Every participant in the GCSE/A-levels penalty shoot-out will have one attempt which either counts as scoring when they missed, or counts as missing when they scored. This is not a beautiful game.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.