An exam board has defended its decision to “significantly” hike up the grade boundary for a GCSE English resit exam after “shocked” college leaders complained of lower-than-expected pass rates and threatened legal action.

Last week’s results day revealed that 20.9 per cent of the 148,569 England-based students resitting their English language GCSE achieved a grade 4 pass – which is 5 percentage points lower than 2023, and almost 10 percentage points down on 2019.

College principals have pointed the finger at Pearson Edexcel, claiming that there are thousands of “distraught” students who sat the awarding body’s 2.0 exam paper and were predicted to finally achieve their grade 4 pass but ended up being unsuccessful.

This was because Pearson shifted the grade 4 pass mark from 73, used in both the June and November 2023 resit series, to 84 this summer.

Entries to the 2.0 exam – which is designed specifically for resit students aged over 16 – more than doubled this year, from 21,111 in 2023 when 37.4 per cent achieved a grade 4 pass, to 47,904 in 2024 when the grade 4 pass rate fell to 20.7 per cent.

After receiving complaints from the college sector, Pearson told FE Week: “Our GCSE English 2.0 qualification was awarded for the first time in 2022 when grading was deliberately more generous to reflect a gradual return to a pre-pandemic standard. 

“With 2024 being the first year when grading is fully back to normal, we have undertaken extremely thorough and detailed work to ensure the standards required in GCSE English 2.0 are in line with the national GCSE English Language standard.”

Exams regulator Ofqual also admitted that it raised concerns with Pearson about their grading of the 2.0 specification in summer 2023, and asked the awarding body to “investigate and improve their approach to aligning standards across English Language specifications for 2024”.

Principals that spoke to FE Week said they understand that grade boundaries can fluctuate but complained that Pearson’s increase was out of step with other awarding bodies, adding that they are yet to receive a satisfactory explanation for the huge rise.

AQA is the largest GCSE English language exam body and had over 83,000 entries for students in post-16 education in the 2024 series. Its grade 4 boundary pass mark went up by just two, from 71 to 73.

The proportion of AQA resit students that achieved a grade 4 pass fell only slightly from 25.7 per cent in 2023 to 22.8 per cent in 2024.

Collective complaint and legal threat

FE Week understands that more than 60 colleges have been negatively impacted by Pearson’s grade boundary rise.

One of the most affected is Luminate College Group, which runs four colleges Leeds. It had over 4,000 entries to Pearson’s English 2.0 exam this year, with 700 students between the grade 3 and 4 boundary.

In one example offered by Luminate, a student scored 54 marks with Pearson in 2023 and improved to 80 marks in 2024, but they still only achieved a grade 3.

Luminate chief executive Colin Booth said: “I believe that that Pearson Edexcel’s position and decisions have seriously undermined both the examination system as a whole and government policy on maths and English GCSE retakes. 

“Our real examples show students that worked hard all year and, on a fair and ‘apples v apples’ basis, improved their marks in the exam significantly but still received a grade 3 in both years.

“Pearson Edexcel’s actions leave us all in the impossible position of having to try to explain to young people why working hard and improving your skills and marks in the examination may not lead to an improved grade. We are now having to also explain to these young people why they have to study and take the exam again in November.”

Carol Thomas, principal of Coventry College, said her team was also left “shocked and disappointed” at their GCSE English grades, adding that there was no notification of the significant grade boundary change until the day before results day.

“Pearson decided to make this change at the last minute or make it and just not inform anyone – so all staff across the sector have been working in the dark,” she told FE Week.

“For some learners this could be their second, third or even fourth attempt and this time they thought they had achieved it – but that success has been taken away unnecessarily.”

A group of 30 colleges has penned a collective complaint letter to Pearson that outlines their “serious concerns”.

The leaders are calling for a reversal or review of the decision “resulting in a more reasonable and fair approach to the change in grade boundaries consistent with other exam boards”, a clear explanation as to the rationale behind the decision, and a commitment to communicate significant future changes in a timely fashion.

The letter also demands free of charge remarks and resits to affected students, as well as a refund of the 2023/24 exam entry fees for the cohort.

Booth said his college’s next move could be to go legal and launch a judicial review, depending on Pearson’s response.

‘This has to be questioned at the highest level’

Introduced in 2014, the government’s resits policy forces students who have not achieved a grade 4 pass in English and/or maths GCSE by age 16 to continue to work towards achieving these qualifications as a condition of their places being funded.

Students who achieve a grade 3 must retake their GCSE, while students with a grade 2 or below can either take a functional skills level 2 or resit their GCSE.

The policy has split the sector since its inception, with some arguing it is a vital lifeline for young people who struggled at school, while others say that forcing students to repeatedly retake the exams is demoralising.

Booth said the government resit policy and the examination system “must be at least based on the principle that young people who work hard and then very clearly demonstrate a significant increase in knowledge and skills in an examination should see their grade improve”.

Cath Sezen, director of education policy at Association of Colleges, recognised that it is “vital” that grades are standardised across different specifications and exam boards and while grade boundaries can change year on year, she pointed out they have a “disproportionate impact on resit students as unlike year 11s they cluster around the grade 3 and 4 borderline”.

Sezen said that “such a significant change” in the grade 4 boundary for the Pearson 2.0 specification, with an impact on progression opportunities for “so many” students, “has to be questioned at the highest level”.

“Neither can the ongoing implications for colleges of more students needing to resit their GCSEs be underestimated,” she added.

An Ofqual spokesperson told FE Week the regulator is “aware of concerns raised, in particular about Pearson’s communication with its centres”.

“We have been monitoring closely the actions that Pearson has taken,” the spokesperson added.

Pearson said in a statement: “After the completion of marking, it is common for grade boundaries to differ from previous years. Occasionally, grade boundaries may vary more than anticipated. When this happens, we know that it can be surprising and disappointing on results day for those students, teachers and parents/guardians who do not receive the grades hoped for. 

“We appreciate that this can be particularly disappointing for students post-16 who are resitting the subject to achieve a grade 4, and for colleges who are teaching the qualification. 

“We are providing full support to help colleges, schools, students and parents to understand results this year and provide advice on next steps.” 

Pearson also pointed out its English 2.0 grade boundary shift, which was +6.9 per cent from 2023, is not the most significant ever. The exam board said other grade boundaries varied from –9.3 per cent to +8.3 per cent compared to 2023.

The government will create a £3 million “content store” to train artificial intelligence (AI) to be more reliable to help teachers mark work and plan lessons.

Government documents, such as curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised student assessments will be pooled into a “content store”, with AI firms encouraged to use this to train their tools, the Department for Education said.

Ministers hope this will generate accurate, high-quality content, such as lesson plans and workbooks that can be reliably used in schools and colleges.

Stephen Morgan, the new minister for early education, claimed the announcement marked a “huge step forward for AI in the classroom”. 

“This investment will allow us to safely harness the power of tech to make it work for our hard-working teachers, easing the pressures and workload burdens we know are facing the profession and freeing up time, allowing them to focus on face-to-face teaching.”

£1m to incentivise AI firms

The content store will be funded by £3 million from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). 

This includes a partnership with the Open University, which is sharing learning resources.

It is aimed at firms building tools to help teachers mark work, create teaching materials and to assist with routine administrative tasks.

To incentivise AI firms to use this, an extra £1 million will be awarded by the DfE to those with the best ideas to put the data into practice to reduce teacher workload.

Each winner will build an AI tool to help teachers with feedback and marking by March 2025, and applications open on September 9.

But none of this money, allocated as part of a wider DSIT project, will go directly to schools and colleges to help them develop and adopt AI.

DfE says providing AI with data boosts accuracy

It comes as the DfE said it would today publish test results showing that providing generative AI models with this kind of data can increase accuracy to 92 per cent.

This is up by a quarter, from 67 per cent, when no targeted data was provided to a large language model, it said.

The development of more sophisticated AI has sparked debate about its potential benefits to schools, along with fears about its potential misuse, such as if used to cheat assignments.

The DfE’s policy paper on generative AI in education also warns content created can be inaccurate, inappropriate, biased, out of date or unreliable.

In October 2023, the DfE hosted an AI “hackathon” event, where school and college leaders and tech experts discussed how the technology could be used to reduce teacher workload.

They explored how AI could help draft and review written policies published on school and college websites and how ChatGPT could be used to create parent newsletters, among other issues.

The DfE said teachers at its hackathons said standard AI tools “weren’t yet fit for purpose” for education use, as outputs were below national standards and they were tricky to use. 

DfE to publish safety framework on AI products for education

The department also pledged today to publish a safety framework on AI products for education later this year.

Morgan will meet ed tech firms before setting out “clear expectations” for the safety of AI products for education.

In May, FE Week revealed ministers were planning to appoint ed tech evidence checkers to help schools work out which products deliver the best impact as part of an AI “training package” for teachers worth up to £5 million.

But this was put on ice when the election was called. 

A YouGov poll of 1,012 teachers in the UK in November found almost two thirds think AI is too unreliable to assess students’ work or help with resource or lesson planning.