The long read: Josiah Elleston-Burrell had done everything to make his dream of studying architecture a reality. But, suddenly, in the summer of 2020, he found his fate was no longer in his hands
He tried not to panic. He wanted to make an appeal before his spot on UCL’s architecture programme went to someone else – again. But nobody, not his teachers, not Ofqual, not government ministers, would have been able to say in this moment what counted as admissible evidence for him to mount a protest. He had been told what he was worth and given no means to disagree. Many of those I spoke to in the worlds of education and politics insisted that if Johnson’s government had betrayed the country’s youth that August morning, it was not with the algorithm. It was with the mess made of appeals.
Approach-1 was already a famous failure. Perhaps it was the first algorithm in the history of computer science to be condemned on the front page of every major British newspaper. During the parliamentary meeting, Taylor was urged to publicly disown his co-creation. It would have been easy for him to blame the crisis on a rogue, out-of-control algorithm. With his usual craven briskness, Johnson had done exactly this, muttering about a “mutant” strain of code. Taylor could not bring himself to denounce Approach-1 in such terms.
The algorithm did what it was supposed to do. Humans, in the end, had no stomach for what it was supposed to do. Algorithms don’t go rogue, they don’t go on mutant rampages, they only sometimes reveal and amplify the cruddy human biases that underpin them. Ofqual’s mistake was to think this exercise – which made plain our usual tricks for filtering and limiting young lives – would be morally tolerable as it played out in public view. Taylor apologised to everyone who had been hurt by Approach-1 and later resigned his position as chair of Ofqual.
