Thursday 17th October 2013 - A Level grades, and student numbers

I went past a secondary school in Sheffield today and noticed a banner outside proudly proclaiming the proportion of its pupils who got top grades in A level this year.  Such marketing has become very common, usually associated with some statement about the level of improvement from the previous year.  I am wondering how schools are going to cope with what will almost certainly happen to A level results in 2014.

Put simply, they are almost certain to fall.  The key reason for this will be the fact that the school year 2013-14 ushered in the new era in which there will be no in-year resits of A level components.  A number of pupils disappointed to receive B grades used to retake the relevant assessments in the hope of raising their performance to an A.  That is no longer possible.  I have seen some modelling done for OFQUAL, the overseer of school examinations, which suggests that there could be a fall of over 3 percentage points  in the proportion of pupils getting A grades.  That will come on top of the depression of the proportions getting the top-most grades in 2012 and 2103 which has been noticed by the media but not strongly reported.  How will the newspapers - and schools - report results in 2014 when many young people will get poorer final grades than they would have done if they had been in earlier cohorts?

All universities in England now receive an allocation of places with which they can admit students who have not achieved ABB grades in A level - or who have not taken A levels at all.  The best universities receive the smallest allocations, based on their past record of admitting the 'best' students. Yet the proportions of these 'best' students will fall in the future for reason I have just spelled out.  And in addition the cohort of 18 year olds in 2014 will be smaller than that of 2013, and it will continue to fall until nearly the end of the current decade.

What this means for the 'best' universities for 2014 - and presumably beyond - is that they will be fishing in a diminishing pond for the bulk of their student intakes.  Competition for students will rise yet further.  And this increasingly marketised environment the power of the most worthwhile consumers (the 'best' students) will arguably grow as they demand more from universities who want them to be accorded the precious Conditional Firm (CF) status in the applications round.

In 2012 we had the sight of the best universities, in greatest demand from students, leaving places unfilled because they were prohibited from dropping their admissions grades. I fear that the situation in 2014 could see a repeat of those empty places, because there just won't be enough top quality students around to fill the places available.  With the applications season just started it's going to be an interesting year.