LEADING figures in education have spoken of their disappointment at losing a High Court challenge over the exam fiasco which affected hundreds of North East students.

A judge has ruled that teenagers who fell foul of changes to GCSE English were treated unfairly, but exam boards and regulator Ofqual did not act unlawfully.

Pupils, schools, teaching unions and local authorities, including Newcastle City Council, joined forces for the unprecedented legal challenge.

They accused the AQA and Edexcel exam boards of unfairly pushing up the grade boundaries for English last summer in what amounted to “illegitimate grade manipulation” involving exams regulator Ofqual.

Teenagers sitting the exam in June were marked more harshly than those who sat the exam in January, causing hundreds to miss out on the target grade C.

However, two judges at London’s High Court, Lord Justice Elias sitting with Mrs Justice Sharp, dismissed the challenge yesterday, which means students will not have their exams re-marked.

John Collings, executive director of children’s services at Newcastle City Council, said: “We are bitterly disappointed with the court’s decision, although they did acknowledge that it was wholly understandable why students were so upset at the inconsistent treatment between those who took the exam in January and June 2012.

“That will be little consolation, of course, to the thousands of students up and down the country whose futures may be adversely affected.

“We must now consider what, if anything, the alliance of schools, students, teachers and local authorities can do next.”

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “Maintaining standards over time is just one part of the exams system – fair- ness to pupils is just as essential. Fairness was compromised last summer, bringing the exam system into disrepute.

“The changes to GCSEs proposed by the Government would make exams even more unfair. Now that pupils increasingly remain in education or training until they are 18, we ask why this government won’t consider the basic question of what kind of national testing, if any, is now needed at 16.”

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the union was “very disappointed” with the decision. “Grading decisions were unfair and an injustice was done to many thousands of pupils,” he added.

Lord Justice Elias dismissed the alliance’s application for judicial review, but said the issue had caused an outcry and was “a matter of widespread and genuine concern properly brought to court”.

He added that the problem was Ofqual could not “remedy unfairness between the January and June cohorts without creating further unfairness elsewhere”.

The two exam boards had both conceded it may have been the case that students who took exams in January were “treated more generously than they ought to have been” than those who sat them in June, under different grade boundaries.