The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse

Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by James Sosythe and Katie

Pauls. So today Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, gave us a look ahead to what

exams will look like this summer. Katie, can you tell us what he announced? Yeah, so after the

horror show that was the algorithm last summer, we have a situation where Gavin Williamson has said

that all A-level grades this year and exam grades are going to be done by teacher assessment

and that would be teacher assessment risks and looking at various factors in that and coming up

with grades. And I think that this has broadly been accepted as the idea is there's no perfect solution

if you cannot have children A in school but two sitting exams as to what you do about

fairness and grades. So I think this generally seems to be seen as the least worst option,

but that's not to say it's without problems and we've been starting to hear some of the

concerns over A, the practicalities of doing this and to the flaws in the system. James, you've written

on Coffeehouse today about

one floor that you foresee. Can you tell us about it? Yeah, so if you think about it,

for all sorts of understandable reasons, teachers are going to give their pupils a benefit of

a doubt when it comes to potentially life-changing marks. For that reason, this year's results are

going to be very generous. There's going to be quite a lot of grade inflation in the system. Now, think about the lower sixth, right, people sitting there at

levels next summer. They are going to be competing for university places and jobs against people

who've had these teacher assessed grades. So if they are subject to a normal, rigorous exam marked in

the standard way, they will be put a huge disadvantage.

Now, this disadvantage is so obvious, but the government is going to have to do something about it.

It is, to my mind, it is obvious that next year's A-Levels are going to have to be marked much

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