from everything I’ve read, colournoise has it regarding the 4/5 pass / “good pass” fudge.
At the top it was to address the every growing number of A* grades being awarded – it was supposed to be an exceptional mark, but the exceptional performances were being lost in the same category as the very good.
So 9’s sort of supposed to be something close to “A**”
It’s all going 1 – 9 next year apart from Business Studies as far as I understand it (at least on the curricula our kids’ school are using). No idea why that is.
It is a bit daft this year with the mixed scheme – the strangest one is maths, for those doing Additional Maths it hasn’t changed, so my lad’s got a numerical grade for Maths and an alphabetic one for additional. Formatting his CV will be much uglier than it should be.