With A Level and GCSE results due out next week, how has it worked this year?

  • ITV News Meridian's Social Affairs Correspondent Christine Alsford reports.

Next week hundreds of thousands of A Level and GCSE students across the South will be receiving their results, after the most disrupted year of education ever.

Usual exams were abandoned after it was decided they wouldn't be fair, because some students have missed out on huge amounts of face to face schooling.

Instead, teachers submitted grades to exam boards, with the idea being that pupils were tested on what they had been taught - not what they might have missed.

Some students at Queen Mary's College in Basingstoke told ITV Meridian how teacher based assessments made them feel less nervous, but they still worry about what their results will be.

  • Rebecca Hamer, Harry Roberts and Asha Raja shared their views.

Each school and college devised and carried out tests in Spring using national guidance, with grades awarded then checked by exams boards to ensure fairness and consistency.

This process involved schools providing evidence from individual candidates, selecting them at random.

  • Ali Foss, Principal at Queen Mary's College

Most schools and colleges are confident that this system will be fairer than the one used last year, when an algorithm downgraded millions of results unfairly and led to huge protests before a government u-turn.

But, there are concerns that by allowing each school to set questions and then mark their own students risks creating problems.

  • Jess Staufenberg, Private Education Policy Forum

Despite concerns that the system is open to abuse, the exams watchdog says there are measures in place to stop that happening.

It also says it isn't aware of widespread malpractice taking place this year.

  • Simon Lebus, Chief Regulator at Ofqual

Many believe we should keep some form of teacher assessment long term rather than returning to all or nothing in the exam hall. 

But some will continue to question whether 2021's results will have the validity of previous years.