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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, a spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm

Isabelle Hoffman and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and today a special guest, Lella

Halloon. Fraser, we're going to be talking about a level results today and we've

obviously had those results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland this week. They

represented a change from the last two years in that they were the first exams

students had sat since the pandemic. Just give us an overview of what those

results were like. Well, we've had the great inflation persisting yet again. I mean

normally you get 25% of kids get an A or A star. Last year was 45%, this year is

35%. So the government has decided to rig it sort of halfway between normally

year and last year. So that means that A star, the toughest grade you can get in the

A level system, that was achieved or given to shall I say 15% of kids rather than

8% of kids. Now this is of course very confusing for the students involved. It

was worse than last year's but way, way better than in a pre-pandemic here. But

of course the problems this creates is for universities. We have you know by no

means all A level students go on to university. Those that do will be

applying to various courses and then you've got the situation where you've

got say a Russell groups course, say a tough course. You'd have enough places

for I don't know the top 8% to get A stars but not for the top 15%. But these

universities are finding it impossible to distinguish really between anybody

...