What flaws with our examination system have been highlighted by the pandemic?
What the pandemic has done is to accentuate existing problems and raised public awareness of the mechanisms of the examination system. One fundamental flaw is about on-the-day performance – the reliance of the entire judgment of a pupil's success resting on a single performance on a particular day.
There’s the short-form, time-pressurised format of it. If the intention is to give a young person the best chance to show what they know, then why have a time restriction which benefits the fast writers and quicker processers? The skills that are being rewarded are not necessarily deeper understanding or authentic engagement with a subject.
The objectivity of exams has been thrown into stark relief. We’ve known that they're not very reliable and judgments are not comparable, particularly in certain subjects. The pandemic has raised the level of public discussion about how good and fair they are.
The issue with the ‘bell curve’ has been, again, raised. Most people would not know that a third of people have to fail and that one year can't do better than another year essentially.
After calls from figures including Robert Halfon and Kenneth Baker for GCSEs to be scrapped, do you feel GCSEs are fit for purpose in their current form?
“Fit for purpose” is a really interesting expression. The purpose of GCSEs was to enable school leavers to leave with something that reflected the fact that they had done some learning. That purpose no longer exists because people remain in full-time education for longer.
Instead, they've become:
A filtering and ranking mechanism for entry into competitive sixth forms
A rough and ready way of employers being able to say: "Okay, this person's broadly literate and numerous"
A first filter for very selective higher education courses (I think this is overstated; I don’t think many higher education courses are interested in GCSEs)
Their purpose is unclear and it seems to be a way to rank schools rather than to really reward individual performance or to give useful feedback to pupils. You just get a number. It doesn't say: "Well done, you're particularly strong in critical analysis of texts, but not so strong on spelling and punctuation and grammar." So it's only helpful for kind of this sort of top-down ranking thing.
What impact would reform of GCSEs have on then the level 3 Pathway?
It depends on the institution you are in. If you're in an all-through institution then you don't need to do them at all; if it's only about progressing to the next level of study, schools will already know who's suitable to go on and do A Levels.
The skills that are being rewarded are not necessarily deeper understanding or authentic engagement with a subject
I think that you could have a variety of indicators about what pupils need to have to go on to level 3 study. For example, if you're going to go down a scientific pathway, then you need to be able to say, "I'm qualified for the next level of science study”.
I'm not sure how rich the information that GCSE results really is as evidence for suitability for sixth form study. It's a bit random to say, "You've got to have five level 5s in order to come into our sixth form," because really you only need to be good at three things to go onto sixth form study.
Is the government right to be considering defunding BTECs in favour of T-Levels?
No, and I can't see any rationale for it at all really. I think there are some interesting things about T-levels, particularly the work placement aspect which is really interesting and good for developing vocational opportunities. But you can have an even broader suite of vocationally relevant qualifications by doing BTECs.
A T-level is all eggs in one basket, you've decided what you are doing; that might be right for some people but for lots of people it's not.
I also really like the multimodal assessment approach of BTECs. It's not all exams, there's an element of coursework and there's an element of tests and there can be elements of workplace activity as well.
Although I haven’t delivered BTECs myself, I'm with Lord Baker when he calls it an act of educational vandalism. I really can't see any reason to not allow them to coexist with T-levels and A-Levels.
After confidence in examinations plummeted following two years of grade inflation and 2020's algorithm fiasco, what, next year and into the future, needs to be done to restore confidence in our examinations and wider qualifications system?
I don't think they deserved confidence in the first place. Restoring confidence would be unfortunate because then people will go, "well, there's no need to change because we've got these useful tools to measure kids against one another" when they're absolutely not useful.
As far as I'm concerned, blow the whole thing up and start working towards something that deserves confidence, and delivers useful skills to young people.
The challenge is to help the current cohorts through this imperfect system, in a way that isn’t demoralising for them and still gives them the information that the current system demands. This system is fundamentally unhelpful to young people's broader learning, but also wellbeing. They're a source of immense anxiety to pupils because of the stakes that are attached to them.
So pragmatically, we've got to coexist with them for a bit longer whilst we get on with designing something that's going to be more reliable and engaging for pupils and that's fit for this century.
You said you're in favour of suspending all confidence in it, but that pragmatically, you've got to coexist with them whilst you look at longer term reform. What are one or two key changes you would like to see to how the exams are done?
With my Rethinking Assessment hat on, what we would like to see in the end is a comprehensive learner profile that is built up over time and reflects the variety of learning experiences that young people have had. It would outline subject-specific and interdisciplinary achievements, work experience, but most crucially, skills development. For example, the ability to communicate orally and collaborate.
We are looking at doing a pilot about ‘creativity’ so that people can show evidence of when they have been able to improve their creativity levels and why that is a strength or an area of development.
Ultimately, this profile will paint a rich picture of a young person's school learning story, built over time which can act as a passport to universities and beyond that they can take with them and build up as they go through life and build up almost like a kind of cumulative LinkedIn profile.
And they'll be different for different people. People might, for example, have additional maths qualifications that show that they've specialised in that. The technology is there to do this, it just needs to become policy to build that portfolio in schools.