Commenting on the statement delivered by Education Secretary
today that
teacher assessed grades will replace GCSE and A-Level exams in
2021, Patrick Roach, General Secretary of NASUWT-The Teachers’
Union, said:
“In the context of the current lockdown and the level of
disruption already experienced by pupils over the last nine
months, cancelling exams is the only sensible course of action.
“However, we cannot risk a repeat of the chaos that engulfed this
year’s exam results.
“Pupils and teachers now need urgent clarity and further detail
of how the arrangements for teacher assessed grades will work.
“The Government has a huge job to rebuild the confidence of
pupils, parents and teachers after last year’s debacle and it
will be critical that the arrangements for how pupils’ skills and
knowledge are to be assessed and graded are transparent, clearly
communicated and vitally, that they ensure fairness for all
pupils.
“Teachers are already under incredible amounts of pressure and
stress as a result of the impact of Covid on schools and the
Government’s chronic mismanagement of the pandemic. The
arrangements adopted for assessing pupils’ grades must be
developed in consultation with the profession and must keep
workload and bureaucracy to a minimum.
“The Education Secretary says he is putting his trust in teachers
by turning to teacher assessed grades, but he must also show them
his respect by learning from the mistakes of the last nine
months.
“The Minister must also go further and cancel statutory tests for
primary pupils as these assessments would be without merit this
year and to press ahead with them would be profoundly unfair in
the circumstances.”
