[feintruled]

And don't forget the totally illogical situation of awarding someone a higher grade for advanced maths then they got for basic maths.

I had a passing thought of a different system - using basically the same calculation of a school's predicted grades, allocate each school a 'budget' of marks they can distribute as they see fit, based on whatever criteria they pick. Just to be clear, I don't think that's a particularly good system either, but a canny government could have deployed it to avoid much of the direct criticism.

[simonh]

So then you'd get parents complaining about teachers picking their favourites and downgrading pupils for personal reasons, which still would have been the government's fault for implementing a system open to such abuse.