Penryn College joins alliance to challenge GCSE results
8:10am Monday 1st October 2012 in News
By Greg Fountain, Reporter/Photographer
Penryn College has joined an alliance of students, schools, local authorities and teaching unions to protest this summer’s GCSE English results and begin a legal challenge.
The school is rebelling against the last-minute changes in the marking system, which saw many students who were predicted to get grade C’s actually get D’s.
Penryn is one of more than 110 schools who have added their namesx to a pre-action letter - sent to exams regulator Ofqual and exam bodies AQA and Edexcel - threatening High Court action should they maintain their refusal to re-mark this summer’s English exams.
The move comes after the Welsh education minister ordered a remark of all papers graded by WJEC (the Welsh exam board) amid complaints from across the UK that pupils who sat exams in June got lower grades than those who sat them in January.
Marie Hunter, headteacher at Penryn College, said: “We will wait and see what happens and see whether our government decides to act the same way as the Welsh government has acted.
“I’m absolutely for fairness. Exam grades have got to be consistent from year to year.
“It needs to be right for these children, they have worked incredibly hard and it needs to be fair from January to the summer.”
The letter from the alliance reads: “It is inconceivable that two cohorts of students enrolled for the same course in the same academic year, who have undertaken the same work and invested the same effort, and who will be competing in future for the same opportunities, should be subjected to such radically different standards of assessment and award.”
Mrs Hunter has asked concerned readers to sign the online petition, calling on Ofqual to reverse its “arbitrary decision to raise grade boundaries,” at www.gopetition.com/petitions/open-letter-to-michael-gove-and-ofqual/sign.html
