THERE has been widespread controversy regarding the English GCSE results and some headteachers are quite incensed about the alleged manipulated marking.

My daughter has received her English results and was pleased to get an A grade. This excellent result was mainly due to an inspiring English teacher at Cheney School, a Ms Corinna Swift.

However, there is a caveat to this happy tale. My daughter’s coursework was all graded at A* level and the only reason her final result was an A rather than an A* was that, inexplicably, her poetry exam was graded as a paltry C.

Even before the furore erupted, my daughter was muttering that “something fishy is going on here.” She felt certain that her poetry would be the best result as she had annotated every single poem and was very confident that she had achieved at least an A in this paper. She also writes excellent poems.

I believe that examiners have deliberately marked down the poetry paper in order to deprive my daughter of her much coveted A* grade. This was cynically done to fulfil a government directive that fewer A* grades be awarded this summer to curb grade inflation.

So my daughter has fallen victim to a political experiment because of Michael Gove’s pompous assertions that GCSEs are too easy and need to be marked more stiffly. He is vainly deluding himself that O levels were harder than GCSEs in order to massage his inflated ego.

He would like to consider himself to be so much brighter and more diligent than today’s studious generation. The GCSE exams are certainly not easier in any way from O levels.

I have looked at the papers and they are, if anything, harder than my O level exams. The marking yardstick was changed from the January exam date, whereby my daughter would have secured her A* grade. We have demanded a remark of the poetry paper by AQA because of the manipulated marking and I urge any other parents to do the same if they feel suspicious.

SUSAN THOMAS, Magdalen Road, Oxford