The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruption to education systems around the world. In England, as part of the government's response to the pandemic, schools and colleges were closed and lessons were moved partially or entirely online. Furthermore, public examinations in June 2020 were cancelled, meaning that methods had to be developed to award qualifications in the absence of external assessments. Teachers were asked to provide, for each student and for each subject, a centre assessment grade (CAG) which represented the grade that the student would have been most likely to achieve if teaching and learning had continued and the student had taken the exams as planned. This would give the majority of students the opportunity to progress to further study or employment, despite the cancellation of exams. A method of statistical moderation, to align the CAGs across centres and with the standards set in previous years, was developed by Ofqual, the qualifications and examinations regulator, and implemented by exam boards to issue students with a final grade (i.e., a calculated grade). Maintaining standards, both between centres and over time, meant that universities, colleges and employers could be confident that the June 2020 results carried the same currency as previously, and students could compete on a level playing field for opportunities with students from previous and future years. Following the issue of results, many students were disappointed with their grades, which in many cases were lower than the teachers' CAGs. There were also concerns about the impact of the calculated grades on different demographic and socio-economic groups of students as well as on students who were "outliers" in their schools (e.g., students with very high prior attainment in low performing schools). In the end, students were awarded "whatever was higher, CAG or calculated grade", despite warnings that such a move could undermine the credibility of the results through grade inflation and have an impact on students' futures. This project is part of a wider programme of research "tracking the progression of the Key Stage 4 June 2020 cohort". Using National Pupil Database data for pupils who completed Key Stage 4 in 2020, linked to the School Census and their Post-16 Learning Aims, the author has already investigated the uptake of qualifications and subjects post-16 in the academic year 2020/21 (Vidal Rodeiro and Williamson, 2022). The research, a first look at progression (with a focus just on uptake, based on 2020/21 learning aims) helped understand the progression to post-16 study of the students who sat GCSEs and/or other Level 1/2 qualifications in June 2020 and how the awarding of CAGs impacted the post-16 choices of different demographic and socio-economic groups. As the Key Stage 5 results for the majority of the 2020 Key Stage 4 cohort (June 2022 results) are now available, the aim of this follow-up research is to investigate final uptake (based on qualifications completed rather than learning aims), retention and performance.