A Shirebrook school principal says that this year’s GCSE and BTEC students have had “the worst of both worlds” and paid tribute to their resilience, as they now wait to find out their final grades.

Mark Cottingham, principal of Shirebrook Academy, believes that this year’s Year 11 cohort are worst-hit than last year’s, who left school without having to sit an exam after they were sent home during the lockdown.

Thousands of current final year GCSEs students up and down the country are now facing a nervous wait for results day on August 12, bringing to a close two years of study that has been badly hit by disruption caused by the coronavirus.

Such was the scale of the disruption, which meant students spent as much time studying at home as they did in the classroom, that they were not required to sit official GCSE exams because they missed so much school time.

However, they all sat a series of tests and assessments in class and exam halls, the results of which will be combined with the results of previous work in order to give them a final grade.

This contrasted with last year, when students had all but finished their two years of study and external exam centres allocated final results based on the result of mock exams and feedback from the school.

Mr Cottingham said that this year the situation is far more complex, with many aspects of the GCSE and BTEC curricula being dropped completely, many students missing more school than others and students in subjects such as drama and music having been prevented from performing their coursework because of social distancing measures.

As a result, schools and the teachers themselves are being asked to set the grades and submit them to the exam boards, which will then review the grades as part of their quality assurance.

Mr Cottingham said: “The scale of the disruption and the fact that some schools were hit harder by Covi-19 than others means that there is huge inconsistencies in the amount of learning that Year 11 students have been able to undertake, while chunks of the curriculum have had to be left out entirely.

“Despite that, students have still had to sit assessments, which last year’s cohort didn’t have to do even though they had two years’ of full learning, and so I feel for them because they have had the worst of both worlds.

“That said, I have been amazed at how our students kept going, especially those who faced some hugely challenging circumstances and so I’d advise them to focus on the way in which they developed the resilience to just keep going and think about the positive of their educational experience over the whole past 11 years.”

Mr Cottingham and his staff will now spend the next week analysing the students’ results and their teachers’ assessed grades before submitting them.

He said: “There is a delicate balancing act because we are being asked to submit grades that are a fair reflection of the students’ work but whose overall outcome should be in line with a normal year.

“That’s really hard because the students have had anything other than a normal year because of the time in school that they have lost. It’s wrong that they should be penalised for this, but we also need to bear in mind the integrity of the grading process and the fact that if they get a certain result they will be expected to be able to study at a grade-appropriate level at their next school or college.

“It’s impossible to square that, so I would expect their next place of learning to make an adjustment in their teaching to make up for the inevitable gaps in students’ knowledge.”