THE principal of Carmel College has said students are feeling “short-changed” after seeing their A-level results downgraded.

Results this year are based largely on centre-assessed grades, predicted grades submitted based on the teacher’s professional judgement.

However, these grades have been moderated by exam boards, and has seen some students receive lower grades than the ones their teachers submitted.

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There is some hope, however, through the Government’s ‘triple lock’ system, which was announced late on Tuesday.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said students will be able to use mock exam results or sit autumn exams if they are unhappy with their calculated grades.

The Government has asked England’s exam regulator, Ofqual, to determine how and when valid mock results can be used to calculate grades.

The 11th hour announcement came in the wake of a dramatic U-turn by the Scottish Government earlier this week after ministers abandoned plans to downgrade more than 124,000 results.

In St Helens, Carmel College has seen a number of its centre-assessed grades downgraded, with principal Mike Hill describing it as “unfair”.

He said: “We’re a high performing college, we’ve got a good record of results so we were fairly confident that results would stick up, and I think in the main, that is true.

“But we are disappointed with how the system is being run and we’re disappointed, as we’re hearing this morning for so many young people who may have got into university because universities are bending the rules a little bit, but feel that they’ve been a little bit short-changed by this system.”

Mr Hill said some of his colleagues elsewhere have reported “huge” changes to the centre-assessed grades they had submitted.

He believes this “undermines” all the hard work that schools, colleges, teachers, students have done in recent months.

Mr Hill said: “We spent literally a month preparing all that data.

“Every individual student had to have their results uploaded manually because they didn’t allow us to do it on bloc.

“So it I literally had people here working seven days a week for about two or three weeks to get all that data in. And it just seems to be in one fell swoop they’ve said, ‘oh well, we’ll come up with something else now’. It was obvious they picked up that it wasn’t quite working right.

“Our results here if they stand as they are would kind of knock us back five or six years in terms of every year we’ve been outstanding. The results still look good overall.

“We’re still within one or two per cent of where we were last year, but I’m hearing from other colleagues that there are huge changes to what they’ve been putting in.

“I think if you set a system up, great, then stick with it.”

As a college, Mr Hill said Carmel’s pass rate is slightly down on last year overall, with high grades around one per cent down.

However, Mr Hill said this year’s BTEC results have been “really fantastic”, with 96 per cent managing to attain a top grade.

He said the grading system for BTEC subjects was “fairer”, as students had already completed a significant amount of assessed work before lockdown.

But overall, Mr Hill said it feels like there are more disappointed students than usual.

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Mr Hill said: “Every year, we’ve always got maybe 30 or 40 students for whatever reason unfortunately, today’s not a great day.

“It just feels like we’ve got probably more today disappointed people. Even the ones who have got their university place, they still feel that they are probably going to appeal.

“I think this is going to be a national thing, a bit like in Scotland.

“I think we’re going to have a lot of very unhappy young people, parents, schools, teachers, and I think we’ll have to see what happens in the next 48 hours or so.”