This is not merely "ham-fisted normalisation". In many cases, the student's attainment is being completely ignored!
> but I think the bigger issue is
The tricky thing about this scandal is that it is actually about 8 different catastrophes for students all enmeshed together. This makes it hard to know where to start critisising the government.
I think it should be possible to create ‘virtual classes’ above the threshold by combining smaller like classes together.
Such a model would be fairly ham fisted.