Due to the ongoing disruption in students’ education as a result of the coronavirus pandemic next year’s public exams may have to be cancelled.

The National Education Union (NEU) have said more pupils are being sent home due to higher Covid-19 infection rates which makes going ahead with exams unfair and less likely to take place.
However, the government is committed to GCSE and A-levels taking place next summer, however they are considering to delay it by a few months.
An official spokesman said “We are working with the exam boards and Ofqual on our approach, recognising that students experienced considerable disruption to their education last year.”

Dr Mary Bousted, NEU joint general secretary said this was a position that was becoming "increasingly untenable" and teachers urgently needed to know what evidence of pupil achievement they needed to collect so fair assessments could be made. Her comments were made a day after national attendance figures revealed one in six secondary schools were not fully open to all pupils last week, with 16% having to send at least some pupils home to self-isolate amid a rise in virus cases.

It also follows comments from several university vice-chancellors who have all called for next year's exams to be cancelled, and for the focus to be on pupils catching up missed learning instead.

Dr Bousted said national figures showed 200,000 children and young people were not in school last week, and that with 7,000 new cases nationally yesterday (29/09/20) alone, disruption was inevitable.
"All of that makes it more and more difficult to see that students will get the opportunity to consistently be in school across the country," she said.
"As the situation develops it may become inevitable that what we have to move to is a system of centre-assessed grades... everybody appears to agree that this is a real possibility - that we won't be able to do exams.
"The only body which is sort of sticking its head in the sand, sticking its fingers in its ears, is the government, and that is what they have done consistently in this crisis.

Kenneth Baker, a former education secretary who introduced GCSEs has also called for the exams, along with A levels, to be cancelled in 2021 due to the continued disruption to learning caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter written to the current education secretary Gavin Williamson urging him to accept that teacher assessment "will have to be used again next year.”
And, in order for this to happen, guidance will need to be provided to schools on “the sort of report that teachers should be keeping for each student now, not only on attendance, but on performance as the weeks and months go by", he said.

Michael Morpurgo, one of Britain’s popular children’s author has voiced his opinion and called for the “tension and fear” to be taken away from pupils who have missed so much work during the pandemic.
The author of The War Horse said the 2021 GCSE and A-level grades should be based again on teacher assessments, as they were this year after exams were cancelled due to the coronavirus.
He said: “Teachers know the children best, and to take the tension off it should be so again.” Grading should be “teacher led and teacher judged”.

Algorithm Chaos
This summer’s exam chaos was caused by a faulty algorithm that purposely down graded grades in ways that were described as "unfair and unfathomable" by head teachers. Students were given grades based on teacher assessments moderated by an algorithm.

The algorithm was quickly discredited and marks were recalculated based solely on teacher assessments. 

Many headteachers are calling for papers to be pushed back from May to July to give students time to catch up.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We expect exams to take place next year and continue to work with Ofqual and the exam boards on our approach, recognising that students will have experienced considerable disruption to their education in the last academic year.
"There are a range of measures proposed by Ofqual following a public consultation, including a possible short delay to the exam timetable and subject-specific changes to reduce pressure on teaching time. We will continue to work with school and college stakeholders, Ofqual and the exam boards, to ensure that exams in 2021 are fair."

History remains one of the most popular subjects at A-level, with some figures suggesting that it continues to gain favour with youngsters beyond GCSE. While that is, of course, welcome, the subject at this level remains ironically confined in historical scope.

Despite many attempts to widen the curriculum, time after time, students, and indeed schools, are returning to modern subjects. So endemic is this trend that it has been bestowed the moniker Hitler and the Henrys. In short, Nazism and Tudor history reigns supreme.

Now, arguably, this is a consequence of context. These topics are more immediate and accessible than, for example, medieval history and thus theyare easier to broach (not necessarily easier to understand).

Additionally, when we attempt to understand the present, it is all too easy to frame current events against events that are, historically speaking, more recent. Take for example the rise of the Islamic State, the Ukraine Crisis and the latest conflict in the Middle East.

Answers to these problems present themselves immediately before, during and after the first world war and, while that may be true in some respects, others may just as powerfully argue otherwise.

As the American historian Roy P. Basler once remarked: 'To know the truth of history is to realise its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity." Still, such truths warrant scepticism – the historian must investigate, deliberate and record.

While the limited nature of Hitler and the Henrys remains troublesome, they fact that we (students, schools, colleges, scholars, media outlets) return to them time after time says something of their hold over our 'historical imagination'.

It is also important to note there is a bureaucratic element to this – attainment levels of schools inform the choices they make across all subjects when it comes to the formation of a curriculum.

Here is a rundown of the top three OCR A-level history topics that were offered last year in order of popularity.

1. Russian Dictatorship (1855-1992)

Beginning with the ascension of Alexander II to Tsar, considered to be one of the greatest Russian reformers since Peter the Great, this topic takes us through one of the most radical periods in the history of any nation.

It concludes with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, an unfortunate legacy of the second world war that did very little to improve tensions between countries, despite the horrors of the conflict.

2. Civil Rights in the USA (1865-1992)

It tragically took a civil war for the United States to end slavery on the continent, yet, that was not the end of the struggle for equality. While the deliberate bondage of another based on race was outlawed, in its place came segregation – the Jim Crow laws – which ensured the subjugation of African Americans.

So it was that in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, the fight to end racial discrimination evolved from the abolition of slavery into a fight for civil rights. It would be another long battle, but one that had to be carried out. Is it not so that "all men are created equal", as the Declaration of Independence's preamble stated?

3. Dictatorship & Democracy in Germany (1933-1963)

The rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism and its inherent malevolence is one of the most visible and known-about epochs in modern history, which reveals, all too tragically and graphically, how far into the nadir of barbarity humanity can fall.

We look back at this period and are lost for words. It is still difficult to properly explain Hitler's ascent to power, the second world war and the Holocaust, as the historian Ian Kershaw once noted: "Hitler was no inexorable product of a German ‘special path’, no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere ‘accident’ in the course of German history."