“Proof of this includes the fact that 50 per cent of young offenders incarcerated are BAME, 40 per cent of the UK’s poorest households are black households, the risk of death in childbirth for black mothers is five times that of white mums and black people of working age are twice as likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts“

None of these things ‘prove racism’. Asserting ‘racism’ to be the cause of something does not necessarily make it so.

Herein lies the problem: many ‘BAME’ (horrific term) people seem to consider ‘We have bad outcome x, therefore it MUST be because white people are racist’ to be a compelling and self-evident argument. Many ’Not-BAME’ people, unsurprisingly, do not consider it to be self-evident, resent the accusation and do not accept that accusation alone is ‘proof’.

Even if we accept ‘we should have avoided having to make this choice’ as true, it hardly excuses making such a poor decision when confronted with that choice. This is the kind of ‘well it shouldn’t have been on fire in the first place’ logic we see used to defend the fire brigade after it tells people to stay inside a towering inferno. They’re supposed to be the emergency services, not the everything-is-going-ok services, and similarly we expect the government to be able to govern competently in a crisis -even one arguably of its own making- and not only when everything is going ok.

Not only has the government failed to come up with a satisfactory alternative to using unaltered teacher predicted grades, but they have managed to create a situation which is significantly worse (in terms of inflation, university admissions and messing students about) than if they had simply used the predicted grades in the first place.

As for the young friend: we have no way of knowing for sure that she would have achieved 4 A*s in her exams. Pressure does funny things and A Levels are not GCSEs. Some students underperform genuinely held expectations, and it’s the difficulty in identifying who that will be which inevitably leads to predicted grades averaging higher than actual grades. There is no reasonable way teacher predictions could avoid grade inflation, without being given a set number of each grade to assign.

Will people still earn as much staying at home once companies realise that if a job can be done remotely from a home 5 miles away, it can probably be done remotely from a home 5000 miles away?

I suspect what you describe is where we will end up.

I’m inclined to agree, but they lost the option of a full u-turn because some students have received higher grades from the algo, which cannot now be taken away from them. It’s now worse than if they’d just gone with the predicted grades in the first place.

The system should have been: over the last ~3 years in this subject, the school achieved x% A*, y% A, z% B, and so on, so the school has that many of each grade to assign to students (plus a small buffer, and a minimum cap on the top grades to avoid them being totally impossible to get in extreme cases). Option to sit exams free of charge for anyone unhappy with assigned result.

Far from perfect (as anything without an exam taking place will be), but at least the schools would have to share the blame where there are students unhappy with their results.

Is there any particularly strong correlation between achievement in exams and jobs which have life saving/threatening implications? I’m not convinced. There are obvious examples at the high end of the scale (surgeon, pilot etc.), but we also expect firemen and soldiers etc. to be able to perform in the real world in high pressure, lives-on-the-line situations without necessarily being good at exams. I suspect there are more of these jobs at the not-so-academic end of the scale than in the middle.

‘Or’ doesn’t have an ‘n’ in it, so I have dismissed the rest of your post.

I suspect most would dispute that life experience isn’t learnt, as that is a nonsensical statement. Not that it seems relevant to anything I said in the previous post either way.

The younger generation -the one being discussed here- isn’t running the country and did not decide everyone had to hide indoors for months. You are accusing the younger generation of being risk adverse and of never having lived, while the person I replied to accused them of being all out partying and wild everything: both generalisations cannot be true.