The brouhaha around Britain about the difficulties of assessing high school students’ exam results is an entirely unnecessary and could have been avoided – by a more proactive approach.
There was no reason not to allow the pupils to write the exams in a socially distanced way.
As for venues where they could have written exams, most of the schools were either empty or were catering to only a minority of pupils. In all schools there was also a huge amount of non-use of buildings, and public libraries were also devoid of users so they could have been accessed for exams.
Pupils writing these important entrance exams in any case had a couple of months when they did not need to go into school and could have prepared for exams by studying at home – or, for those pupils whose home environment was not conducive, special large rooms at schools could have been prepared.