Ofqual asked us to analyse responses to a joint Department for Education and Ofqual consultation on contingency arrangements in case summer 2022 exams could not take place safely or fairly.

Our team read all responses to the consultation, mapping each individual or organisation to a respondent type (such as school/college staff, students or education/training providers). For each of the consultation questions, we either carried out a segmentation analysis across respondent types (for closed-ended questions) or conducted a thematic analysis to identify key ideas and perspectives (for open-ended questions). As part of this process, we applied a machine-assisted approach, with codes generated by machine learning models in Python used as a quality assurance check of manually applied codes. In addition, we developed a codebook that summarised the distribution of key themes across different respondent types.

This work helped inform the arrangements for the Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs) process in the event that summer 2022 exams would have been cancelled, ensuring that students would be in a position to successfully progress to the next stage of their education or to employment even if public health restrictions meant that exams could not go ahead.

➥ Find more on the consultation here.

➥ The report is available here.