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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.

And it's A-level results day.

The story this time is not about a mutant algorithm. Instead,

it's grade inflation. James, can you talk us through what's been going on? Last year, the government

tried to use an algorithm to control grade inflation. There was a huge hoo-ha, because the algorithm,

while it might have been right in the round, was clearly unfair in

individual cases, because the way it worked was to look at your school's past performance and then

work out what grade you were likely to get. And that meant that if you were an exceptional

pupil at a historically underperforming school, you were marked down. And that created some very

hard and very unfair cases.

So this year, the government have gone for teacher assessed grades. But the problem that comes

with teacher assessed grades is that when it comes to any kid on a grade boundary, the teacher

is, in the vast majority of cases, is going to be inclined to be generous.

And we see this.

You know, in 2019, the last year with normal traditional exams,

with students at desks in an exam hall being told,

you know, put down your pens,

25% of students got either an A or an A star.

This year, that number is almost 45% just shy of that.

And I think what that jump in the number of A stars and A's gets, which comes after two years of

...