Promoted beyond my abilities?

Today, I feel deeply sad for A-level students receiving their results. As someone who, even 6 years later, remains proud of the hard work that went into my A-levels, imagining my grades being nothing to do with my own dedication and commitment, but the historical performance of my school, fills me with unease. This seems to me like another frantic move by the government to offer quick and easy 'solutions' to the problems presented by the pandemic.

This tactic obliterates the extreme hard work by many students at lower-performing schools, and hands an even easier route to well-paid work and higher education for those whose families could already afford to send their children to private school. This is a dynamic which only serves to worsen the systemic wealth inequality in this country, where those already affected by inherited economic hardship are further disadvantaged by the inequality in the education system, thus making these individuals more likely to suffer financially in the future. That is not to say that you cannot receive a good education at a state school, but with policies of austerity affecting the education sector, private schools can certainly afford many more resources which facilitate, and thus give advantage to, their students' learning.

Results can of course be appealed for the mere price of £111 (which is still payable if you lose the appeal). This is a cost which I am sure will leave some students, and their families, trying to scrape together the money, weighing up whether or not they can afford to take a chance on their child's future. This is a restrictive catch-22: the students most likely to need an appeal are the least likely to be able to justify it financially.

While I hope universities put measures in place to mitigate the effects of this scheme on prospective students, I spare a thought for those who were excited to showcase their true abilities, against their school's average performance.

I do have sympathy for the people in charge of this decision; we are in a situation that no one could truly have seen coming, and the additional stress to already-demanding governmental responsibilities is not enviable. However, I do think that this is yet another symptom of a (majority) privately-educated government out of touch with the circumstances of the average citizen, and highlights the urgent and growing need for diversity in top jobs*. We need ministers who are in touch with the situations and needs of those in less privileged positions than themselves. This lack of representation at governmental level must be addressed if we want to tackle economic inequality and structural disadvantage in wider society.

What this shows more than ever is: algorithms are not neutral. They reflect and absorb pre-existing societal inequality and bias. I hope this situation has shown us that they must be approached with caution, and not seen as an easy and 'fair' route out of uncertainty.

*Research by the Sutton Trust has shown that 2 in every 3 members of Boris Johnson's cabinet were privately educated. Johnson himself went to Eton College.