There's much to consider from Northern Ireland's 2022 GCSE results, and their breakdown.

Thankfully, the days of algorithms, teachers and schools having to determine grades are behind us and we’re almost back to where we were pre-Covid.

Almost but not quite; students still followed reduced specifications and there were other allowances, but essentially, the assessment landscape is slowly getting on its feet again.

So what were the results like, and what does it really all mean? To get to grips with that, there’s the somewhat over-complicated landscape of qualifications.

Firstly, for GCSEs, you can have results in grades, but if your school offers English board qualifications, then your results come in a numerical form; in other words, Grade 4 is the same as a C- and so on.

Additionally, there is a range of equivalent qualifications that are supposed to open the same doorways to Sixth Form, vocational studies, apprenticeships or employment. Some do, some don’t, but that’s for another day. These are graded in other ways, such as Distinction, Merit and Pass or by NVQ levels.

The most popular non-GCSE equivalent comes from BTEC, the well-known footsoldier for slightly older students. They offer a ‘BTEC First’ and are awarded at Levels 1 and 2 and in various ‘sizes’.

This means they can be the same as 1 - 4 GCSEs, depending on how many units you do. Level 2 is the same as a GCSE pass grade, with Level 1 just outside that.

NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications) tend to be occupation-based and are rarely offered in schools. There are no exams with NVQs, they’re purely on-the-job assessments.

Functional Skills Certification is the final part of the Year 12 qualification tapestry; it’s a back-door way of getting a GCSE standard qualification in English, Maths and IT, though it’s usually used as a way of getting students that piece of paper that allows them to leave school or progress with an English and Maths qualification.

As for the grades achieved this year, well, it’ll be a while yet before we can delve into how individual schools fared, but overall, for the first exams since 2019, 37 per cent of all GCSEs in Northern Ireland were a grade A or A*. Outcomes for grade C and above were up almost 8 pre cent on 2019, though down slightly from last year.

Although the Year 12 school population has increased by almost 1 per cent from the pre-Covid period, the number of those taking GCSEs has actually fallen by just over 1 per cent. What does this swing of 2 per cent tell us?

Not very much, really, but if it continues it may be because there is a small move towards some of the other ‘equivalents’ listed above or alternatively, some schools are restricting subject options.

There’s too little to go on at this stage, but suffice to say, schools are at pains to show how many GCSEs or equivalents their school achieves.

As for English and Maths, almost 89 per cent achieved a Grade C or above in English Language, up a cracking 8 per cent on 2019, while those achieving a Grade A/A* rose by almost 6 per cent on the previous year.

Pass rates in Maths were also up by 8.5 per cent for the same period, with top grades accounting for 29 per cent, up 4 per cent.

Comparing things to last year is more interesting where, of course, teachers were determining the grades.

On this topic, a very important point must by noted; the vast majority of teachers worked tirelessly to ensure students got the fairest marks.

Despite rumours to the contrary, I don’t know of any schools who just handed out good marks for the sake of them.

However, such professionalism on behalf of schools and their teachers has been vindicated, as the differences between teacher-assessed and exam-based grades are just in low single figures of percentages across most subjects.

As for A-Level, well, it’s a broadly similar pattern, with 44 per cent of exams given an A/A*, down 6 per cent on last year, but a huge increase from 2019 when it was 29.4 per cent.

The big news, however, is that in Northern Ireland we recorded the highest GCSE pass rate in the UK, at 99.1 per cent, up from 2019’s figure of 98.5 per cent but slightly down by 0.3 per cent from last year.

For those of you who like such minutiae, the most popular A-Level subjects in Northern Ireland are Mathematics, accounting for almost 10 per cent of all A-Levels, down through to Biology, Health and Social Care, Business Studies and History, at 6 per cent.

There’s a gender split, of course; for males, it’s Mathematics at 13.2 per cent, then Business Studies, History, Biology and Physics at 6.9 per cent.

For females, it’s Health and Social Care (single) at 11.8 per cent, then Biology, Mathematics, English Literature and Chemistry at 6.1 per cent.

So what does all this tell you? The first thing is that these improvements don’t happen accidentally. Many teachers tutor free of charge to ensure their charges get the best results possible.

This is achieved by after-school classes, revision sessions, re-explaining things at lunchtime while eating their sandwich, and other such acts of voluntarism.

Teachers are paid according to the hours they teach, and their time budgets are carefully constructed to accommodate all the schools’ annual needs before the school year commences. Extra revision classes are often over and above this.

Secondly, it’s always a headline when exam results go up or down each year, but the reality is, there are life cycles in curricula and the more a teacher teaches a specification, the more resources they build up and the more adept they become at delivering their subject.

Schools will always have new staff, so it’s not something parents should worry about as those just in through the door work 60-hour weeks and beyond, checking and double-checking that they’re on the right hymn page.

That is, except for a teacher I had at a nearby town’s grammar school who managed to teach the wrong specification one year. That was in the 1980s though ... how times change.