How the unluckiest year group in history overcame Covid and strikes to achieve record results

Pupils defy A-level expectations as share of top grades grows

A-level students have achieved the best set of grades in a non-pandemic year despite being one of the unluckiest cohorts in history.
Pupils who collected their results on Thursday morning had overcome Covid, teaching strikes, and the “crumbling concrete” crisis in schools.
Defying expectations, the share of A*s and As rose to 27.8 per cent this year, up from 27.2 per cent in 2023. The previous record was 27 per cent, achieved in 2010 and 2011.
It means almost one in 10 A-levels awarded this year was an A*, making up 82,000 out of 887,000 total entries.
The top grades come despite the class of 2024 having suffered a tumultuous period of education defined by frequent school closures and online learning.
A year before starting their GCSEs, Covid struck, tearing pupils away from their classrooms as the country went into lockdown.
Demi Meakin, an 18-year-old student from Alfreton in Derbyshire, was one of many to endure online learning.
“I’m the kind of person who likes to ask a lot of questions but we were watching pre-recorded powerpoints,” she told The Telegraph. “It was such a big change for everyone.”
Demi’s cohort was the first to sit their GCSE exams in 2022 after two years of cancelled exams in 2020 and 2021. As the government looked to return results to pre-pandemic levels, grade boundaries were toughened.
She said: “We had already had so much affecting our education and then they raised the bar at exams.”
The effects of the pandemic began to clear as she started her A-level course, but another threat to her education loomed – teacher strikes.
With unions demanding a multi-billion pound pay package, several of Demi’s teachers walked out on strike at the start of 2023.
She said: “The teachers didn’t tell the school that they were striking. We still went to school but we were given independent work to do. It was only over a couple of months but sixth-form is so short that any amount of time matters.”
Despite the multiple challenges she faced in her education, Demi opened her results to find she had secured the grades needed to become the first person in her immediate family to attend university.
She achieved As in biology, chemistry and psychology and won a place at the University of Oxford to study medicine.
“I don’t think I could say whether we are the most unlucky year group, as I don’t know what it was like for others, but there were a lot of challenges,” she said.
“We have definitely had a harder time than people before the pandemic.”
At St Leonard’s Catholic School in Durham, Nicola Cook, 53, breathed a “big sigh of relief” as her son opened his results.
Her 18-year-old child, who she did not want to name, achieved A* grades in psychology and media studies and an A in music despite facing a “year of hell”, she said.
Students at the school were forced to undertake lessons remotely and at alternative venues after reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) was found in the school building.
Raac is a crumbling type of concrete that was widely used in the second half of the 20th century.
The Department for Education confirmed the presence of Raac in 231 education settings in England, and many were forced to close or partially shut for several days in September while safety inspections were carried out.
At St Leonard’s, students were taught in various locations throughout the year, including an office building in a nearby town, a “non-soundproofed” converted sports hall in the school grounds, and in a conference room at the Radisson Hotel in Durham.
“For the first full term, the kids couldn’t even get access to their textbooks or their previous coursework, or if you had a musical instrument in the music department, you couldn’t even get that back,” Ms Cook said,
She added: “The temporary accommodation to rehouse the school wasn’t usable until after Easter, so our kids have had a year from hell.”
A report by academics in January called for pupils at schools where teaching has been badly affected by the Raac crisis – such as St Leonard’s Catholic School – to have their exam results lifted by up to 10 per cent.
But a one-off dispensation has not been granted to all pupils in exam years who faced disruption to their learning and teaching owing to Raac.
Ms Cook said the good results of students was “in spite of all of the disruption that they’ve had”.
The disruptive experience of students who took their exams in 2024 is matched only by their preceding year groups, who suffered many of the same challenges.
Sir Ian Bauckham, head of English exams regulator Ofqual, said this year’s students may even had a slight advantage over previous years when GCSE exams were cancelled, having “had the benefit of GCSE results to guide their selections” for A-level subjects.
He also suggested this year’s school leavers were simply smarter, and benefited from doing a set of formal assessments before their high-stakes A-levels.
“There is no grade inflation this year. Standards have been maintained from 2023 and any change is largely due to the ability of the cohort,” he said.
Neil Enright, headmaster of Queen Elizabeth’s School in north London, where more than half of A-level entries achieved A* this year, suggested pupils were helped by having practice in both their GCSEs and AS levels.
“We sit AS exams in our school and I think that, perhaps particularly for boys, the process of going through formal, high-stakes exams really consolidates learning. It gives them a very realistic picture of where they’re at,” he said.
“It commits knowledge to long term memory as well, so I think I would agree that having AS exams rather than internal assessments may well be a significant factor that meant our results have been consistently high.”
But experts accused Ofqual of failing in its mission to return the proportion of top grades to pre-pandemic levels, as the exams regulator had promised to do.
In order to match 2019 and cap the level of A*s and As to 25.4 per cent, about 16,000 fewer top grades would have been handed out this year. Instead, they went up.
Prof Alan Smithers, director of education at the University of Buckingham who analyses A-level trends each year, had forecast the drop in top grades.
He said A*s and As would likely come down to 25.4 per cent “resulting from England completing the job” in weeding out pandemic-era grade inflation from the system.
Commenting on today’s results, Prof Smithers said: “So it’s not only a failure to fully implement the policy, but it is a complete reversal of what Ofqual has been doing to stabilise the grades”.
Pupils will also have more choice of university places than in any recent year following a drop in demand from mature and international students, meaning the number and variety of places available in clearing will far exceed the norm.
Rebecca Montacute, head of research and policy at the Sutton Trust, an education charity, said “the last few cohorts have been unlucky in different ways”.