Consultation on proposed changes to the assessment of GCSEs, AS and A levels in 2022: Analysis of responses – Ofqual
COVID-19 has had a severe impact on students’ educations over the past two academic years, and there is significant uncertainty about the impact the pandemic will continue to have over the coming academic year. In response, DfE and Ofqual have proposed a package of measures to exams and assessments to help mitigate the impact of these disruptions, including choice of topics/content, provision of advance information and support materials for selected GCSE, AS and A level exams.
Alma Economics was commissioned by Ofqual to analyse the responses to a consultation launched in July 2021 to collect public opinions on the proposed package of measures. After carrying out a stakeholder mapping exercise to classify respondents to different respondent types, our team of experienced researchers read more than 6,000 responses, measuring the frequency of answers to quantitative questions across respondent types and conducting thematic analysis of responses to open-ended questions. Our team also developed a Python program to create a codebook recording all qualitative themes identified by responses to better understand which respondent types were more likely to discuss different themes.
This work helped identify the best way exams and assessments should run in summer 2022 to create equal opportunities in education for all students, despite the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the consultation, DfE and Ofqual decided to proceed with the changes proposed in the consultation based on the broad support expressed in consultation responses.
Find more on the consultation here.
The report is available here.