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Just when universities thought things could not get any more challenging, unpredictable and difficult to manage, we’ve had an A level results shambles presented to us.
Dealing with this crisis comes at the same time as we are trying to implement a rather different operating model to cope with the Covid-19 impact. The impact on universities, staff and current & prospective students is huge and will have reverberations throughout the next session
However the A level crisis shakes out - and I really do hope that we can navigate a way through it which best serves the interests of students who have already suffered enormously - it does suggest we need a very different approach to university admissions in future.
Govt education policy messes happen all the time - we’re pretty used to it - but these are small in scale in comparison to the latest enormous pile up. It is hard to remember anything quite like this - the ILA fiasco 20 years ago is perhaps the last biggest comparable event.
But the ILA policy failure, although it was very expensive, arguably did not have such a huge impact on so many people and such resonance as the current mess - it was intended as a policy innovation rather then a failure to manage an existing system.
The reverberations from this A level round are going to be with us for a very long time to come. And it is going to take a very long time to clear this up.
