Teachers, Parents Call For Results Review At London School Amid Downgrading Claim

Teachers and parents at a London secondary school have called for hundreds of GCSE and A-level results to be reassessed independently amid claims senior staff instructed teachers to downgrade their initial marks.

Teachers at Ravensbourne School in Bromley say they were asked to deliberately mark down students this year because their results were significantly better than in previous years.

They told local media senior staff members are concerned the marked improvement could trigger allegations of artificial grade inflation, something the school’s multi-academy trust was concerned about.

An internal email, sent to some staff by the deputy head, Louise Cooper, said the three-year trend in grades at the school should be used to support the final marking decisions adding that she would look at anomalies which did not match the previous three-year trend.

Another document showed a teacher protesting about grade reductions for specific students, with the teacher stating they were not willing to sign off grades they believed to have been manipulated to fit with the grades from previous years.

This year, education secretary Gavin Williamson scrapped GCSE and A-level exams due to the pandemic and replaced them with teacher awarded grades overseen by exam boards.

Students in England achieved record numbers of top grades this year, with a 2.5% percentage point rise in top grades in GCSEs and a 6% jump in points in A-levels.