Westminster A-level student protest against the Ofqual algorithm (16 August 2020)

On the afternoon of Sunday 16 August 2020, around three hundred A-level students gathered in Westminster to protest the standardisation algorithm Ofqual had used to award their grades three days earlier. Demonstrators converged on Parliament Square, the Department for Education on Great Smith Street, and the pavement opposite Downing Street, chanting and carrying placards that read "fuck the algorithm." The chant, picked up at the doors of the Department for Education and circulated widely on social media that evening, is the moment the slogan crystallised into a piece of UK public vocabulary; subsequent UK welfare-algorithm and content-moderation campaigns continue to draw on it.

Context

A-level results in England, Wales and Northern Ireland had been released on Thursday 13 August 2020. With exams cancelled because of COVID-19, Ofqual had used a standardisation algorithm to adjust teachers' Centre Assessed Grades against each school's historical performance. About 39% of teacher-predicted grades were revised downwards, with the heaviest downgrades concentrated in pupils at state schools in less affluent areas. A smaller demonstration of around a hundred students had already gathered outside Downing Street on Friday 14 August, marching down Whitehall and chanting "sack Gavin Williamson" and "teachers not Tories"; by the weekend, organisers were calling a larger Westminster gathering through social media. The 16 August protest was the day on which student anger crystallised, and the day on which the algorithm — rather than the wider grading process — became the public target.

What happened on the day

Around 300 demonstrators gathered peacefully in Parliament Square and the surrounding Westminster streets, moving between the Department for Education on Great Smith Street and the Downing Street barrier on Whitehall. Speakers called on Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to resign and pressed universities to honour the offers they had made before results day. Placards criticised Ofqual and the government, with several explicitly directed at the algorithm itself; many demonstrators told PA news agency reporters that the algorithm had unfairly penalised students from underprivileged backgrounds. One of the protest's organisers, Ted Mellow, an 18-year-old from Wood Green in north London, told PA: "Everywhere you look, people are either angry or confused and, quite frankly, that's the Government's fault." Among the demonstrators was Daisy Dewar, an 18-year-old care leaver who had lost a scholarship offer to study medicine at the University of Nottingham after her grades were reduced from A*AA to BCC. The chants the day is now remembered for — "fuck the algorithm" — were heard most clearly outside the Department for Education and were filmed by ITV News, analysed at length by Novara Media the following day, and surfaced widely on Twitter that evening.

The protest had no single sponsoring organisation. It was called by sixth-formers and recent school-leavers through Twitter, Instagram and group-chat networks rather than by an established campaign group, with city-by-city sister actions in Nottingham, Coventry and elsewhere organised by other student volunteers. Foxglove was running the parallel legal track on the 18-year-old A-level student Curtis Parfitt-Ford's behalf and had sent a pre-action letter to Ofqual on 14 August, but it did not call or co-ordinate the Westminster gathering.

Outcome and significance

The Westminster protest is remembered as the public-facing turning point of the Ofqual crisis. The morning after, on 17 August 2020, Williamson announced a U-turn: the standardisation algorithm would be withdrawn and 2020 A-level grades would be awarded on the basis of teachers' Centre Assessed Grades. Coverage at the time, including in the LSE Impact blog and in longer-form reflection by Novara Media, framed the Westminster gathering as the moment at which a procedurally complex piece of automated decision-making was made legible as a political question — and, in particular, made legible by the people most directly affected by it. Subsequent commentary on UK public attitudes to government use of AI has returned repeatedly to the chant as the point at which automated decision-making by public bodies entered ordinary political vocabulary. The protest sits inside the broader Foxglove / Curtis Parfitt-Ford campaign against the Ofqual algorithm, where the legal track and the public-mobilisation track ran in parallel through the same four days; the Westminster gathering is the campaign's public-mobilisation high-water-mark.