Are the A-Level results in 2020 the greatest example of governmental systemic racism we’ve seen in a generation in the UK?

There have been others, the Windrush scandal, policies on stop and search but I can’t remember anything on this scale impacting so many people, not because of an unintended consequence of an overzealous policy but as an active decision to discriminate. The government or Ofqual must have seen that discrimination was likely and proceeded nonetheless, or, they did not realise the scale of the issue which seems to me to be of the highest order of incompetence and ignorance.

I have no horse in this race, my kids are very far from A-Level age and I’m white. I grew up in the West Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s so benefited from a multicultural environment throughout my schooling. I certainly saw racism when with my BAME friends socially but obviously I don’t have lived experience of racism directed at me, except to the extent that I was indirectly targeted because of the people I was with. However, the disproportionate impact on BAME people of the UK government’s strategy in deciding A-Level results seems so obvious I had to comment. It is only by immediate and overwhelming public dissatisfaction with the current approach that a change in policy may be possible and this needs to happen quickly. I’m writing this in the hope that I am one in many many voices making the same point.

Just in case I need to, I’m going to define what systemic racism is. It does not mean that there are individuals at Ofqual or within UK government sifting through students and giving better grades to one race over another because of their specific prejudices. It means that the system (or in this case algorithm) itself discriminates because ethnic minorities are much more likely to be disadvantaged. Being generous, this may not have occurred to anyone behind the algorithm they are using to determine grades (although I feel it should have been obvious) but nonetheless if you are an ethnic minority then your A-Level grade is more likely to have been lower than you had been expecting.

My argument has three pretty simple steps. 

1)     BAME households are much more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. Being specific, according to the Social Metrics Commission in their 2020 report it could be as much as twice as likely, if not more.

2)     According to analysis by the Guardian pupils from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds saw the largest difference between predicted grades and those awarded today

3)     Therefore, BAME households will have been disproportionately impacted. This could be devasting for social mobility and diversity at universities.

Anecdotally, I’ve already heard of many cases of students not being accepted for places at university despite an intention to appeal by the student, with their place being offered to someone else. Thinking this through that means that a BAME person’s place at university is potentially systemically being given to a white person because their grade has been less impacted simply because of the school they attended. I’m going to say that again – on a systemic level BAME students places are being rescinded in favour of white people (potentially). I can’t see any other conclusion. 

This could filter through an entire career, for example, in our salary survey of the IP profession we found that 43% of respondents attended one of only nine universities, therefore if those universities become less diverse, professions that value degrees from those universities will as well. For high demand courses such as medicine, where clearing places are less likely that could mean far fewer ethnic minority doctors from this year’s intake.

I’ve long thought that some sort of additional weighting should be given to A-Levels achieved in potentially more challenging environments – is a B grade from a school where you are the only person within an entire year group to achieve that level due to deprivation a much greater achievement than an A* from an environment where many around you achieve high grades? But in 2020 the government is not only saying that high achieving students from underprivileged backgrounds should not be given any advantage, they are actively making their circumstances much worse, systemically.

To be cynical, today’s events are an argument that as a parent, at any cost, you should get your kids into a high performing school in order to mitigate the risk of being mistreated. You need to play the system as best you can to succeed for your kids. On an individual level that’s entirely rational but at a systemic level kids should not be actively discriminated against simply because their parents are less able to get them into a particular school.

Hopefully by the time you are reading this the government has taken steps to address this. The best of the possible options is to follow the revised Scottish approach of relying on teacher assessment. Yes, that does present some potential issues but from my perspective solving those is much better than what we have now.