Ofqual, established as part of the AQA in 2008 and made a separate and official non-ministerial government department on 1 April 2010, has been at the centre of educational qualifications and awards for well over a decade. But with controversy after controversy emerging, is the root of Britain's educational tree rotten to the core?
In Britain, we have long prided ourselves on educational excellence. Our exam system was built on the principle that clear standards, hard work, and individual achievement matter. Yet today, under Ofqual’s practice known as “comparable outcomes,” fairness and genuine academic rigour are being replaced with a statistical approach that undermines both standards and aspiration.
The concept is straightforward yet troubling. Instead of assessing each pupil’s actual knowledge objectively, where correct answers yield deserved rewards, Ofqual manipulates GCSE grade boundaries based on how well or poorly the overall student group performs. A student’s results are no longer simply about their knowledge or skill, but about how their peers happen to have performed that year.
Consider this year's Russian GCSE. With increased numbers of native Russian speakers from Ukraine sitting the exam, non-native students who have worked hard, learned the language, and mastered it to the expected standard are now penalised. Their grades do not reflect their real knowledge or effort but instead become relative to the performance of native speakers. This skews results, misrepresents genuine achievement, and disheartens the very students our education system is supposed to reward.
More alarmingly, by artificially engineering results, Ofqual masks underlying educational failures. If in one particular year pupils perform poorly, the answer should never be to shift the goalposts, disguising the problem by manipulating grades. The appropriate response is straightforward: identify and fix the root causes such as poor teaching methods, inadequate resources, unclear curricula, or ineffective school leadership.
Instead, comparable outcomes remove accountability from schools, education authorities, and government policymakers. Teachers and administrators lose an essential feedback mechanism that should tell them clearly where improvements are needed. Pupils, meanwhile, are denied a fair and transparent reflection of their own abilities. In their attempts to standardize educational achievement over time, in an effort to combat 'grade inflation', this method instead hinders signs of progression or failure. By maintaining a national stability of outcomes, there is a major concern that students and schools cannot demonstrate improvement.
This approach is dangerous, embedding mediocrity in our education system and fundamentally undermining meritocracy. Our young people deserve an education that rewards genuine ability and hard work, not one that distorts their achievements by arbitrary statistical intervention. Curiously, although this method only emerged in 2011 to combat perceived 'grade inflation', statistical prediction methods have been used in awarding within Britain for much longer. Comparable outcomes has taken this approach and codified it, and made its grade boundaries that much more severe and inconsistent. It's more than just the reduction in the tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to student's grades. It's the denial of a student's right to a fair, objective award that represents their knowledge and work.
If we genuinely care about standards, merit, and the future prosperity of our nation, Ofqual’s policy of comparable outcomes needs urgent reform. We must return to objective, absolute assessment, rewarding students for their true level of understanding, knowledge, and skill, not based on the random luck of who happens to be taking the exam alongside them.
Anything less is a betrayal of the very educational values Britain stands for.