Opinion

Analysis: Unbelievable GCSE results of 2020

La Salle staff wear PPE as students collect their results. Picture by Mal McCann
La Salle staff wear PPE as students collect their results. Picture by Mal McCann La Salle staff wear PPE as students collect their results. Picture by Mal McCann

SCHOOLS and their pupils will, largely, be grinning from ear to ear after an unbelievable set of GCSE results.

It was anticipated that they would be astonishingly good.

Now we know exactly how good, and can be confident that 2020 will forever stand as a record never to be beaten.

There may be suggestions that some teachers were overly generous in their predictions and there will be an equal level of indignation from the profession, horrified by the imputation.

Generous marking or not, there were hefty increases across all grades.

Perhaps the pupils who never were given the chance to shine in the exams themselves deserve this break.

However, next year's GCSE cohort, who have missed a key six months of their education, face the impossible yardstick of the 2020 results.

Others are instead arguing that the results are merely a blip, and they would not be wrong.

The last time there was such a huge rise in the performance pattern was in the early 1960s when the school leaving age was raised.

While the grades issued to pupils yesterday appear, on paper, to be hugely impressive, they risk offering a deceptive sense of validity.

If you take some time to look at the CCEA statistics in greater detail, one or two things will leap out.

Non-grammar schools did enjoy a pretty decent increase in the A* but did not throw them around like confetti. Over in the grammar sector, meanwhile, almost 20 per cent - one in every five entries - was given the top grade. An unheard of annual rise in a single grade of 6.3 percentage points.

The largest jump among non-grammars came in the proportion achieving A*-C, the so-called good grades - up from 67.7 to 80.1 per cent.

Both grammars and non-grammars also dragged more young people over the C* threshold than in 2019.

In previous years, when results improved by even the tiniest of margins, it would fall to some rookie journalist at their first briefing to ask `are GCSEs getting easier?'

The answer has always been a defiant `no'. Had CCEA's abandoned standardised grades produced anything close to this year's teacher predictions, no one would accept `no' for an answer.

Many will maintain that this set of results is unrealistic but they will be accepted given that children's school experience in 2019 has been anything but real.