School leaders fear teachers in England are being aggressively lobbied by “parents with pointy elbows and lawyer friends” to boost their children’s GCSE and A-level grades this summer. This, they say, could have a devastating effect on the attainment gap between well-off and disadvantaged pupils. Richard Sheriff, executive headteacher of Harrogate grammar school and president of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he was worried that schools were being left exposed by the government’s policy of replacing exams in England with grades awarded by teacher assessment. Sheriff said he feared that “parents with pointy elbows” would be more prepared to push for their children to receive better grades, meaning pupils with parents unable or unwilling to confront teachers were likely to be left further behind. “We must protect teachers. If this is all about who can shout the loudest to get their child the furthest, then we certainly won’t be closing the attainment gap, will we? And we certainly won’t be doing anything about social equality in any way whatsoever,” Sherriff said, speaking before ASCL’s annual conference, which begins on Friday. Geoff Barton, ASCL’s general secretary, said the headteachers’ union had warned the government there needed to be strict quality assurance mechanisms to take the pressure off teachers and allow them to justify their decisions. “Right from the beginning, from the very first day, we’ve seen examples of where parents have been emailing individual teachers, saying: ‘My daughter wants to be a doctor in the future, she needs to get a grade 9 in chemistry at GCSE,’” Barton said. “We also have to protect teachers through all of this and when people talk about ‘teacher assessment’, it does seem to me to be unhelpful because it sends out the message that if I’m your chemistry teacher, it’s me sticking my finger up in the air. It won’t be. “That’s why we argued behind the scenes for a more robust quality assurance process to protect individual teachers and individual schools throughout this process.” ASCL criticised recent comments by Simon Lebus, interim chief regulator of the exam watchdog Ofqual, that there would be “a negotiation” between students and their teachers over what their final grade should be. “That’s certainly not the way we saw it,” Barton said. The ASCL also warned that parents remained confused by the government’s guidance about Covid testing in schools, in particular its decision that a pupil with a positive result from a school-administered lateral flow test could not return to the classroom even after receiving a negative result from a higher standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. Reports from secondary schools suggested that students and staff had adapted well to more stringent mask-wearing routines since they returned this week. But Sheriff said his feeling from visiting classrooms was that there were downsides: “I was in a classroom today and it’s so difficult to gauge the mood of a class when you can’t see their faces.” Since the return to school, some young people have been mixing socially outside school, including visiting each other’s homes despite the remaining restrictions, which Sheriff said was a concern. “We only have control over a very small part of their day. Whether the return to school signifies a greater amount of that social mixing beyond the school is probably my biggest concern,” he said. “I think that, in school, controls are really good, generally they’ve been very good indeed. But outside school, if going back to school is a signal that everything’s fine and we can carry on as we are, then that’s the dangerous bit.”