Following the government announcement Monday regarding the awarding of CAG (Centre Assessed Grades) for A levels, Students must check their emails as UCAS will send messages to all students shortly with advice

Here is the advice we received from speaking to UCAS about University places on Monday afternoon:

• Once students have gone into clearing they can’t get their original offers back but they can negotiate better courses than the ones that they hastily accepted. UCAS is still waiting to be sent the CAG grades so they can process all this. Advice to students is to ring the university you really want to go to to see if there is space and if so negotiate your place based on  your CAG. You can then release into clearing by withdrawing from your offer. Students must not release themselves back into clearing unless they have secured the other place e.g don’t quit your job until you have a new one to go to.

As yet, we do not know if the same change to using CAG will be happening for OCR and/or BTEC qualifications. This post will be updated when new information becomes available.

Update: Further to Pearson pulling BTEC grades on 19th August:

Pearson has now written to all schools, colleges and training providers to say the following qualifications are being re-graded:

BTec Level 3 Nationals (2010 QCF and 2016 RQF)
BTec Level 1/2 Tech Awards
BTec Level 2 Technicals
BTec Level 1/2 Firsts
A Pearson spokesman said: “Although we generally accepted centre assessment grades for internal (i.e. coursework) units, we subsequently calculated the grades for the examined units using historical performance data with a view of maintaining overall outcomes over time.

“Our review will remove these Pearson-calculated grades and apply consistency across teacher-assessed internal grades and examined grades that students were unable to sit.

“We will work urgently with you to reissue these grades and will update you as soon as we possibly can.

“We want to reassure students that no grades will go down as part of this review.

“Our priority is to ensure fair outcomes for BTec students in relation to A-Levels and GCSEs and that no BTec student is disadvantaged.