1) I'm going to try and do a fair and balanced summary thread on what's gone on today with A-levels. It is more complicated than the headlines (as ever) so please bear with me.

2) First thing to say is there was no good way to do this once exams were cancelled.

Giving unmoderated teacher grades would be unfair on pupils at schools who graded cautiously; unfair on past/future cohorts; and create a lottery for uni places.

3) Not giving grades at all and hoping unis/employers would have sorted it out would have been chaos. Cancelling the year completely would have been worse for young people.

So having a standardisation process was probably the only viable way to do it. Albeit highly problematic

4) Any standardisation process would have to use a combo of teacher assessment, prior attainment and prior school performance because that's all we've got to go on. There's no other magic information that Ofqual could have used.

5) This does not mean that at an *aggregate* level students in disadvantaged areas or more challenging schools were particularly hard done by. In fact they did better overall than last year. (Here low SES are those from poorer areas).

6) Nevertheless the algorithm was (as I said yesterday) inevitably going to hit outlier students who were at the top of the distribution in schools that haven't had many high performers in the past.

7) Because of this - and because any standardisation process will throw up anomalies the appeals process was critical.

If schools had got the info earlier and been able to "pre-appeal" the clear outliers before students got grades a lot of heartache could have been avoided.

8) Instead the initial appeals process was way too narrowly defined and left to happen after grades were delivered to students.

And even worse it was changed by the Govt at the very last minute. We still don't know what it is even as uni places are filling up.

9) This is disastrous and for me the Govt's main mistake here. It's also caused most of their political problems as most of the young people on the news have suffered egregious errors that would likely have been overturned on "pre-appeal".

10) They will hopefully still get overturned on appeal but we don't know and in the meantime they will have lost their place. This *was* entirely avoidable even if there was no good solution to the problem as a whole.

11) I may be proven wrong on this but I don't think they can now do the Scottish u-turn as that would send uni admissions into absolute chaos given most places have now been awarded.

12) It is absolutely critical that the appeals process is clarified as soon as possible and before the GCSE grades come out next week. So that students who get grades next week at least have clarity around that.

13) It is also critical that schools, especially in more disadvantaged areas, are given a batch of free appeals. It is disgraceful that they are being asked to pay for them in the circumstances. That should Williamson's first announcement tomorrow morning.

14) Couple of additional points - the were probably tweaks to the algorithm that could've improved it like the one suggested below. But they wouldn't have made a significant difference in making it seem fairer https://twitter.com/jepsts/status/1293971535758331905?s=19

15) One intractable problem with the algorithm was that small cohorts (say 3 pupils doing music) couldn't be standardised - leading to some subjects seeing much rises and independent schools (who have more small groups) gaining unfairly.

16) I have no idea how this could have been resolved. You simply can't standardise very small groups. Suggestion that you could have bundled schools together but that would have caused all sorts of other problems.

17) In summary it was always an extremely tricky problem. You could never have satisfied everyone. But by messing up the appeals process so thoroughly the Govt have definitely made it worse than it needed to be.

If you want to hear even more of my thoughts on the topic I did the BBC Newscast pod with the ever brilliant @miss_mcinerney. You can't see it but I was nodding at everything she said. https://twitter.com/SamBonham/status/1294011197419921409?s=19