Today is A-level results day – and yet another reminder of how bizarre and backwards our education system still is in so many respects. There are many reasons why England and Wales are international outliers when it comes to education, but one of our strangest anachronisms is that we don’t follow a post-qualifications admissions system. In every other developed nation in the world, university places are awarded to students on the basis of the grades they actually achieve in their exams, rather than what their teachers predict they will achieve.
In England and Wales, however, we have ended up in a situation where record numbers of students have been accepted at their first choice of university, despite the fact that huge numbers will have missed their offers and over three-quarters of students will have been over-predicted by at least one grade. For the approximately 70,000 students (around 13-15 per cent) who do miss both of their offers and have to go into the frenzy of Clearing, they will have to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives almost on a whim.
We cannot allow stubborn aversion to change in the education sector to halt much-needed reform
Why do we still rely on this arcane, nonsensical and unnecessarily stressful process? Why do we still ask teachers to play the part of astrologers and force students to make some of the most formative decisions of their lives on the basis of academic horoscopes? After all, predicted grades are notoriously inaccurate. Only around 13 to 16 per cent of students actually achieve them; in 2019, 84 per cent of predicted grades were wrong, with 79 per cent being overestimates.
