School pupils in England should take rigorous externally set assessment tests in the place of mock exams next spring, in order to provide a back-up grade for use if the coronavirus forces the cancellation of GCSEs and A-levels, an education think tank has recommended.
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) said its plan would prevent a repeat of farcical scenes in the summer, when the use of computer algorithms to decide students’ grades provoked such fury that the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, was forced to switch to teacher assessments, resulting in a massive increase in the number of teenagers qualifying for university.
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