- If you're watching this,
I imagine that you have your A-level
or your GCSE results coming out next week,
and you're feeling slightly nervous about it.
Well first of all,
please try not to feel slightly nervous,
I am gonna be here literally the whole of next week
with you doing lives on results days,
going over what you need to do for appeals
to try and help you with everything.
But this video is just a quick five things
we can come to expect from next week.
Now I'll tell you what they are,
we can expect higher grades,
we can expect greater inequality,
we can expect lots of appeals,
we can expect the newspapers
to start freaking out about this
and we can expect school's to be very busy.
So that's it,
or stay around for me to explain everything.
(upbeat music)
So the first thing we can expect to see is higher grades.
Now, not because the teachers have been faking results
or looking at the data
or giving better grades to their favorites,
that's not how things are going to work.
But if you've got a student who borderline,
four or five,
or borderline B, C at A-level,
and on a good day,
they'd probably get the higher grades
but if they had a bit of hay fever,
then that'd probably get the lower grades,
really, really borderline.
Chances are, teachers are gonna hedge that back
and go for the higher grades
because teachers want you to get higher grades.
Now, one student per teacher in one class
doesn't seem like it would have too much of an effect,
but when you multiply that across every single teacher,
every single class, across every single school,
every single exam in the whole country,
that is a lot of students
who've been given the benefit of the doubt.
And probably been given the high grade
when they might've had a bad day
when they sat that actual exam and got the lower grade.
So we can expect to see higher grades.
Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't
have got the grades that you did,
you 100% should have done,
and you should be proud of those grades,
but this is one of the reasons we can expect to see
the newspapers freaking out a little bit.
And this is one of the reasons
we can expect to see greater inequalities.
Now, the newspapers have already started
freaking out about this
and putting really lots of a over-dramatic headlines out.
But if you think of a school
in a really, really deprived area,
where the teachers are coming in and out,
and didn't really know the students,
didn't really know the student's circumstances,
where maybe they didn't keep very good track of evidence
because they did a paper,
and then the teacher left and the papers went somewhere,
we don't really know.
That teacher couldn't really be in a position
to give the student the benefit of the doubt
because they didn't know that student very well.
Or they didn't have very good access to assessment things,
they couldn't do all of the revision
that they wanted to with the students.
You compare that school, that student,
to some of the fee-paying schools,
some of the private schools
where parents have been paying 10, 20, 30,000 pounds a year
for their student's education
and where they've been emailing the teachers
threatening to sue them,
unless they give their darling, little child
the highest grades.
Those teachers are under a huge amounts of pressure
to give the students the higher grades.
So we can kind of see already circumstances
where two, perhaps equally intelligent students,
one who lives in an area
where they didn't go to the best school
and didn't get the best education,
is being compared to someone whose parents
were putting a lot of pressure onto the teachers.
So we can expect to see the private schools,
the schools in very good areas,
coming out with higher grades
compared to those in lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
This is something that happens every single year,
but we can expect to see the greater gap in it this year.
And because of those two things,
because of the higher grades that we're expecting,
and because of the greater inequalities
that we are expecting in the results,
the newspapers are going to have a field day.
They have already started.
And they are gonna say that
employers aren't gonna value your grades as much,
or students don't deserve these grades.
Please ignore the newspapers.
It is clickbait in paper format
or online format or Twitter format,
or however you want to read your newspapers.
But if your grandparents come to you and say,
"look at the headline on the front of this paper."
Please just ignore them,
the newspapers are just doing it to sell newspapers.
The newspapers are just doing it for a quick headline,
they don't know you, they don't know the facts,
they don't know what it's really all about.
So please, just try and ignore the newspapers.
Now we can expect to see more appeals this year,
partly because appeals are free this year,
and partly because grades were done
on what is now being referred to as academic judgments,
and you can appeal your grades based on
if you think there is unreasonable academic judgment
by your teachers.
First of all, you appeal to the school,
and then if you don't agree with that results,
then you can apply via your school to the exam boards.
Now, there is a much longer video coming out
about this early next week.
You don't need to worry about that sort of thing yet,
which is why the video is not coming out today.
And then the last thing we can expect
is to see very, very stressed schools,
very, very stressed teachers.
Now, normally on results day,
it's a lovely day where teachers volunteers to turn up
because they want to see their students.
You are not normally going to see
whole schools full of teachers in the school on results day.
There is no requirement for them to be there,
they probably are off on holiday in,
normally I'd say The Canary Islands or something,
but they're probably in Norfolk or Cornwall this year,
in the rain.
But teachers do not have to be in school on results day,
head of departments, maybe.
The exams officer, yes.
So the exams officer is the person
who is going to be dealing with first place
with all of these appeals.
But the exams officer might not have quick access
to all of the data.
For example, if something has been input
into the school system
and they want to check whether it was a 73 or a 37
that was put on there,
and they have to go back to your original mock paper,
which teacher A might've done,
and put in a filing cabinet and locked the filing cabinet,
put the keys in school bag,
put the bag in the back of the car
and then gone on holiday to Norfolk.
It is not always going to be as simple
as go find the mock paper
and check what the actual result was on the paper,
add up all the the marks on the paper again,
and check it is what it says on the system,
it's not always going to be that simple.
So we can expect a few circumstances
where you need a bit of information from the teacher
and they're not available.
So please try not to freak out about this,
you do have a bit of time for appeals
and there are different types of appeals.
You can have a priority appeal or non-priority appeal.
You get more time for a non-priority appeal,
so please let the people that need that
improvement in grade to get to university,
let them have the priority appeals
before you put your appeal in.
Now, it is always important to remember that with appeals,
results can go down as well as up.
So do not just assume that if you appeal your results,
it is going to go up.
Now, like I said,
next week is gonna be incredibly busy,
incredibly stressful.
I am gonna be here with you as much as I can.
I'm gonna be doing lives on a results day,
I'm gonna be going through appeals,
everything you need to know.
I am gonna be here with you the whole way guys.
Ouch.
This is why in some videos, I have unexplained scratches.
(upbeat music)