the times | Thursday December 3 2020 2GM 5
News
Teenagers taking their GCSEs and
A-levels next year will benefit from
more generous grading, advance notice
of questions and help sheets in exams,
the government will announce today.
Ministers will lower boundaries so
pupils are not marked more harshly
than this year’s candidates, who
benefited from higher grades in every
subject after the fiasco over results.
However, the moves raise the pro-
spect of years of inflated grades if the
government continues to protect each
year group compared with the last.
The measures are being introduced
to compensate for disruption to school-
ing during the pandemic. More educa-
Exam pupils to be given questions in advance and help sheets
tion has been lost by those sitting ex-
ams next year than those who took
GCSEs and A-levels this year.
Gavin Williamson, the education
secretary, has also told all primary
schools they must provide at least three
hours a day of remote learning for those
at home, and secondary schools must
provide at least four hours. Full Ofsted
inspections, with gradings for schools,
will not restart until the summer term.
Mr Williamson said that pupils in
England would receive advance notice
of some topics before exams and assist-
ance such as formula or vocabulary
sheets when sitting papers, to ensure
they had to memorise less material.
Additional exams will also be run to
give students a second chance to sit apaper if the main exams are missed ow-
ing to illness or self-isolation. Those un-
able to take any exams will be able to sit
one paper at a later date and that will be
scaled up to count for the whole subject
In August thousands of A-level can-
didates had their results downgraded
from school estimates by an algorithm
before Ofqual announced a reversal,
allowing them to use the school esti-
mates instead. This meant results were
much higher than last year.
In October the government an-
nounced that the 2021 exams would
still go ahead in England, but that most
would be delayed by three weeks to give
pupils more time to catch up on learn-
ing. Now Mr Williamson has revealed
measures to ensure that the gradesstudents receive are as fair as possible.
A new expert group will look at
differential learning and monitor the
variation in the impact of the pandemic
on students across the country.
If a pupil has a legitimate reason to
miss all their papers, then a validated
teacher-informed assessment can be
used, but only once all chances to sit an
exam have passed.
Mr Williamson said: “Exams are the
best way of giving young people the
opportunity to show what they can do.
But this isn’t business as usual. Exams
will be different next year, [and we are]
taking exceptional steps to ensure they
are as fair as possible.”
Primary schools will see the cancella-
tion of some tests taken in Year 2 andYear 6, but others will proceed. Some
data relating to school results will be
published, but not ranked league tables
comparing performance.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of
the National Association of Head
Teachers, said: “While the government
has not gone as far as we would have
liked, it has moved significantly to-
wards the profession. We will continue
to work with them on the areas where
we still have concerns.”
Kate Green, the shadow education
secretary, said: “This plan should have
been in place months ago. These pro-
posals do not offer enough reassurance
to pupils in the regions worst hit by cor-
onavirus who have seen their learning
severely disrupted.”Nicola Woolcock Education Editor
All seemed doomed for Jamie Frost. He
had failed his 11-plus and was in a strug-
gling school. But one teacher saw his
potential in maths. Rather than forcing
him to follow lessons, he was set free to
investigate the subject independently.
That fostering of his creative spirit
has paid off 20 years later. His maths
lessons are now used in thousands of
schools and he will learn today if he has
won a $1 million global prize for revolu-
tionising teaching of the subject.
He says that his Dr Frost Maths
website and its resources have been
used by more than 7,500 schools
around the world, including two thirds
of secondaries in England.
Dr Frost, 34, attended Oxford Uni-
versity, where he shone, winning prizes.
After graduating, he took a job in in-
vestment banking before leaving to do a
PhD in computer science alongside a
team who are now millionaires. He
took a salary cut to become a teacher —
to take a quantitative analyst job. When
I told him I was going into teaching he
said: ‘Well that’s noble.. .’ ”
He had attended the sixth form at
Tiffin School. When the school offered
him work experience, he used his holi-
day leave to try out being a teacher.
While training in 2012, he was given his
own classes.
Dr Frost Maths began as a blog and
became a website after the mayor of
London’s office provided funding. Its re-
sources have been downloaded more
than eight million times. “I realised
some pupils needed more support,”11-plus failure
who became a
maths teacher
in a million
Nicola Woolcock Education Editor to the bafflement of some of his col-
leagues and friends. He works more
than 90 hours a week, teaching at Tiffin
School, in Kingston-upon-Thames,
southwest London, while running the
website, which has 1.2 million hits a day
but earns him no money. He is the only
British finalist in the annual Global
Teacher prize and will find out at a cere-
mony this morning if he has won.
Dr Frost told The Times that his
former career at Morgan Stanley was
“soul destroying”. He said: “I was work-
ing on trading strategies for bond trad-
ers. I was just helping an institution
with loads of money make more money.
It wasn’t a very good feeling. I hated it.”
He went back to Oxford to do a doc-
torate in computational linguistics, a
branch of artificial intelligence, and
helped to teach undergraduates. “I
loved the teaching and had good feed-
back from students, which made me
realise it is what I wanted to do,” he said.
“I got a lot of flak going into teaching.
An American headhunter wanted me
he said. “That
prompted me to
create a new
teaching plat-
form.” Dr Frost said
that he used his AI
background to create
“clever stuff”, in-
cluding resources
that could be
downloaded and
automatically
marked to give
feedback. The
website has hun-dreds of teaching videos that were used
by schools around the world in lock-
down along with whole-class games and
material that can be projected on to
whiteboards, pupils’ tablets or laptops.
All the resources are free and filmed
by Dr Frost in his front room. The cost
of the server is funded by a small
amount of advertising. He is getting the
not-for-profit project registered as a
charity.
“I dropped my salary to go from
banking to the PhD and then again
from the PhD to teaching,” he said. “At
the time it was a substantial loss, when
all my other friends were doing well fi-
nancially. A lot of my [doctorate] group
set up an AI company called BlueBotics
and I probably would have been in-
volved if I hadn’t left to go into teaching.
Three months later they sold it to
Google for $70 million. They’ve all be-
come millionaires, which is quite funny.
“I’m content with what I have and
that this is one of the motivating factors
behind not charging for any of my
resources. I’m keen for students to have
access to good education regardless of
their income, particularly in light of
coming from a relatively low income
family and not getting sufficient aca-
demic support in maths at school.”
Dr Frost grew up in Chessington,
southwest London, after surviving a se-
rious strain of meningitis when he was
six months old. His parents worked as a
childminder and for the local council.
After failing his 11-plus he went to the
sort of school where there were “CCTV
cameras in every classroom”. But he
added: “My maths teacher was a nice
guy and he knew I was quite able. He
said I didn’t have to take part in lessons
but could get on with my own stuff.
I did my own investigations.”
The Global Teacher prize was
established in 2014 by the
Varkey Foundation to raise the
status of the teaching profes-
sion. Sunny Varkey, the Dubai-
based billionaire, is behind the
foundation.
The first and only
British winner was
Andria Zafirakou in
2018, a textiles
teacher at Alper-
ton Community
School in Brent,
northwest
London. She
used her money
to found a char-
ity, Artists in Res-
idence to help
schools. If Dr Frost
wins the $1 million he
plans to expand his
enterprise as a global
platform. “One million
dollars would go so
far,” he said. “What
that could achieve is
very exciting.”Jamie Frost graduated at Oxford,
far left, to become a teacher. He
could follow Andria ZafirakouDAMIEN MCFADDEN/DAILY MAIL