GCSE results row: high court to hear schools' appeal for judicial review

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Category: Youth News

Created on Thursday, 08 November 2012 00:00

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GCSE results row: high court to hear schools' appeal for judicial review

06 November 2012

Judge grants alliance permission to make case for regrading of controversial GCSE English papers taken this summer

Press Association

A high court judge has ordered an urgent hearing of a legal challenge over the summer's GCSE English controversy mounted by an alliance of pupils, schools and councils.

Almost 400 individual cases are involved in the bid for a judicial review. Mr Justice Cranston decided there should be an open court hearing after privately considering the merits of the application for permission to seek a review. A two-day court hearing is expected to be fixed for the near future.

The alliance recently announced it had served court documents on England's exams regulator Ofqual, as well as the AQA and Edexcel awarding bodies. The documents set out their case for a regrading of GCSE English papers taken by pupils this summer.

The alliance is challenging a decision by the exam boards to raise the boundary needed to get a grade C between January and June, as well as what they claim was a failure by Ofqual to address the situation. It claims that as a result of the decisions an estimated 10,000 pupils who took their English GCSE exam in June missed out on a C grade.

A statement of claim submitted to the high court says: "The decisions have prejudiced the life chances of thousands of children. The immediate effects of the decisions include children being unable to progress in education, losing vocational opportunities and jobs and being unable to gain employment.

"The children affected by the decisions were entitled to be treated in a fair, consistent and rational manner by the defendants. They were not. The decisions are incompatible with the most elementary principles of fairness, rationality and good administration. They are unlawful and should be quashed."

The alliance includes 167 pupils, as well as 150 schools, 42 councils and six professional bodies. Ofqual responded to a pre-action letter sent by the alliance, vowing to "rigorously defend" its decisions over the exam results.

The row over the English exams broke out as national GCSE results were published in August. Ofqual's initial inquiry into the controversy, published in August, concluded January's GCSE English assessments were "graded generously" but the June boundaries were properly set and candidates' work properly graded. The regulator insisted it would be inappropriate for either of the sets of exams to be regraded. Instead, students would be given an extra chance to resit the GCSE this month.

A separate report, published last week, warned that teenagers had been let down by an exams system that is abused by teachers under intense pressure to achieve good grades. Teachers in some of England's secondary schools were guilty of "significantly" over-marking pupils' GCSE English work this summer in order to boost results, according to chief regulator Glenys Stacey. She laid blame for the debacle on intense pressure on schools to reach certain targets, which led to over-marking, as well as poorly designed exams and too much of an emphasis on work marked by teachers.

Source: Guardian UK