Jake Waterfield: Grade inflation has made our education system unfit for purpose. Time for lessons from ‘down under’ | Conservative Home

Grade inflation has rendered our education system not fit for purpose. For a radical alternative we have to look down-under.

There are now three certainties in life in modern Britain: death, taxes, and a record number of students getting A’s and A*’s at A-Level every year.

This annual ritual of rising grades has become so predictable it’s almost folkloric (take the number of previous ConservativeHome articles on the subject over the years as evidence), and 2025 was no different.

This year, 28.3% of A-Level entries were awarded an ‘A’ or ‘A*’, up from 27.8 per cent in 2024 and 25.4 per cent in 2019. This is the highest proportion outside the pandemic years (2020–2022), when grades were teacher-assessed. Ofqual suggested the rise might reflect a cleverer cohort – perhaps, but the sustained upward drift demands deeper scrutiny.

For decades, A-Levels served as a marker of academic excellence in Britain – a distinction earned by the best students through rigorous exams and clear standards. Grades, like currency, lose value when too many are printed – an ‘A’ in Britain once signified academic gold, now it’s closer to monopoly money.

In the 1970s, less than 10 per cent of students received an ‘A’ at A-Level. By 2009, the figure had climbed to over 25 per cent, prompting the introduction of the ‘A*’ to help universities identify exceptional candidates. But that intervention hardly slowed the upward drift, this year’s crop of results highlight that the grading curve hasn’t just flattened, it’s turned into a full pancake.

To really understand the implication of this, we have to think about what the point actually is in having secondary education. The first is obvious – intellectual development – that is, to teach students foundational knowledge in key disciplines to equip them with basic skills for the workforce.

The second which, in my mind, is equally as key, is to signal the ability, effort, and potential of students – allowing employers, universities and also themselves to make the key decisions about where they are best set up to be competitive in our economy.

The net effect of decades of grade inflation is clear – grades have lost their signalling power. Employers and universities struggle to distinguish truly exceptional candidates, and as such, students with genuine high achievement may be overlooked in a sea of inflated transcripts. If every book on the shelf had the same glossy cover marked ‘A’, how would we know which ones contain poetry, which ones prose, and which ones are still blank?

If the UK is serious about tackling grade inflation, it must look beyond surface-level reforms, which historically have done little to address the actual issue at play. This is most clearly demonstrated by the introduction of the ‘A*’ in 2010, as mentioned above. Now when just short of 30 per cent of students are getting an A or A*, do we need a new top grade? An A**? An ‘S’ tier?

So, what’s the answer? One possibility is fixed-grade distributions – where there’s a cap on the percentage of students who can receive top grades (e.g. no more than 15 per cent of maths students can get an ‘A*’). Whilst this would be a start, I think for an ideal solution we have to look at our Australian friends who use the ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) system.

With the ATAR system, rather than assigning raw grades based on criteria that can drift year-on-year, ATAR positions each student within their national cohort. A score of 85.00 means a student performed better than 85 per cent of their peers across the country (i.e. he/she was in the top 15 percentile). This is not based on raw marks, but on comparative performance across all subjects, with certain subjects weighted more favourably than others.

The ATAR system reflects the core principle that grades should provide context. A student’s achievement must be anchored not only in what they know, but in how they compare to others with similar opportunities. By contrast, the UK’s shift towards assigning marks based solely on pre-set standards invites inflation without any guardrails – especially when we factor in increasing social and institutional pressure which pushes educators to reward ‘equity’ over excellence.

Moreover, with a cap on the number of people who can get a certain ATAR, it makes the university admissions system much more streamlined. You want to study Law at the University of Sydney? You’ll need a 99.50 ATAR. Get that and you’re in. Pupils (broadly) know on day one of secondary school what’s needed to study their dream course at their dream University.

Compare that to top courses in the UK – take PPE at Oxford for example. You’ll need AAA, but you’ll also need whatever mystery characteristics the Oxford admissions team decides they want to prioritise that year in order to trim the thousands of applications to the c. 250 places (If you can’t tell – I’m still a bitter Oxford PPE reject nearly 10 years on!). The ATAR system requires no personal statements, no smoke-filled rooms, no uncertainty – if you perform better than your cohort, you’re admitted.

Whilst not strictly related to grade inflation, one other benefit of the system I think it’s worth highlighting here (although it’s probably worth writing a whole separate article on this point alone!) is the ability of the Government to amend the ATAR entry requirements depending on the supply and demand for jobs in certain industries. Need more engineers? Easy – drop the ATAR requirement to allow more people into engineering courses. This strategic move attracts more students into high-demand, high-skill fields suiting the needs of the economy. Can you imagine the economic benefits of academically incentivising students towards STEM subjects and away from certain other subjects…?

The ATAR model offers a compelling blueprint, not as a wholesale replacement, but as a guide for restoring rigour and comparability. Practically, these changes could be implemented in the UK by:

1. Introducing relative ranking overlays

• Apply percentile-based rankings alongside A-Level grades – this would allow universities and employers to see not just what a student achieved, but how they performed relative to their cohort
• Rankings could be anonymized and standardized nationally, preserving privacy while enhancing transparency

2. Publish all grade distributions

• Require all exam boards to publish annually all grade distribution data, split by subject
• This would much more clearly expose inflationary trends, and force exam boards to benchmark themselves against national norms

3. Reinforce external moderation

• Expand the role of external examiners and moderation panels to ensure consistency
• This could include random audits of coursework and assessments, particularly in subjects with high rates of top grades – the pandemic proved to us how ripe for abuse the teacher-graded system is

As a sort of disclaimer, I feel it only fair to mention that my partner was educated in Australia under the ATAR system, and whilst she’s a strong proponent of it – she is the first to admit that’s not perfect. The most critical drawback is that an individual’s ATAR calculation can be influenced by school performance averages, meaning students from high-performing schools or cohorts may be ‘dragged up’ through scaling, whilst others are penalised through no fault of their own. As a former non-selective state-school student in the UK myself, I am acutely aware of the implications if the amount of studying (or lack of) my peers did in the run-up to exams had any negative effect on my grade.

Moreover, an ATAR is, by its very nature, a relative measure. Even high-performing students can receive a lower ATAR than an equally intelligent counterpart in a previous year if their cohort is exceptionally strong.

Despite these issues, the ATAR’s core benefit lies in its comparative clarity. It doesn’t pretend that every student is exceptional – it shows who truly stands out.

I don’t believe grade inflation is just an academic issue – it’s also a cultural one. When excellence becomes indistinguishable from adequacy, we erode the very foundations of meritocracy. The UK must act decisively to ensure our qualifications are worth more than the paper they are printed on, not by punishing students, but by reintroducing meaningful comparisons and transparent standards.

A grade without context is just a letter – a grade with context is a signal, to universities, to employers, and to students themselves, that achievement still means something. To close on an oft-quoted line when discussing grade inflation – when everyone gets an ‘A’, no one gets an ‘A’.