In the News
At the end of last month, the Education Select Committee launched an inquiry into the effectiveness of the current crop of post-16 qualifications, including A-Levels. It follows a turbulent two years which has seen the teaching and assessment of these qualifications severely disrupted by the pandemic. GCSEs have also been heavily impacted by the pandemic, and with trust in GCSEs falling to just 27 per cent according to an Ofqual survey this year, calls have been renewed for potential reform to be extended to GCSEs as well as post-16 qualifications, something previously advocated for by the current Chair of the Education Committee Robert Halfon.
Why the need for reform?
The key qualifications that have seen the strongest calls for reform and/or removal are GCSEs and BTECs. Mary Bousted, general secretary of the National Education Union, felt that the pandemic exposed the fact that GCSEs are marked to an arbitrary standard. Amanda Melton, the principal of Nelson and Colne College, feels that GCSEs are “a proxy for whether you’re going to take a technical and vocational or academic route, and that can’t be right.”
However, Colin Hughes, CEO of AQA, takes issue with those who advocate major GCSE reform. He feels that those who use the term “abolish” really mean content reform, and that groups that call for the complete removal of assessment at 16 fail to take into account the students who change institutions at that stage.
BTECs are also under the microscope for reform, though there is vocal opposition to such a step. The government wants to see more funding for new T-levels instead, but critics of the move say this will remove pathways for young people. Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, labelled the scrapping of BTECs “a retrograde step”. Graham Pennington, chief executive of Sandwell College Group believes that without BTECs "possibly tens of thousands of young people would not have a clear route".
What would reform look like?
Suggestions vary on how to replace the current GCSE structure. They range from changing the method of assessment from comparative assessment to criterion-based assessment so that young people are not disadvantaged by their year group, as chair of the Independent Assessment Commissions Louise Hayward suggests, right through to scrapping them altogether and pushing for changes in how secondary education as a whole is structured, advocated by Tom Richmond, the Director of thinktank EDSK (see this month’s In My Opinion).
Other possibilities that have been suggested include simply having fewer exams in year 11, given learners now stay in education until they are 18, and having more “stage not age” assessment, similar to the system of musical grading whereby there is more of a ladder of assessment.
Interview
In December’s edition of The Mark, we spoke to Alistair McConville, co-founder of Rethinking Assessment and deputy head at The King Alfred School in London, about the flaws the pandemic has exposed in our examination system and what, if anything can be done to reform it.
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.
Opinion
In December’s edition of The Mark, Tom Richmond, founder and director of EDSK, outlines three key issues with the current exam system, with cost, breadth and disparities between academic and vocational exams all crucial.
The Urgent Need to Rethink Exams
The impact of COVID-19 on school examinations in 2020 and 2021 was devastating, yet it would be wrong to assume that all was well before the coronavirus took hold. Our research at EDSK has highlighted a range of significant problems with the current exam system.
First, the cost to schools is considerable. For example, making hundreds of thousands of 16-year-olds sit up to 30 hours of pen-and-paper GCSE examinations at a cost of almost £200 million a year is wasteful and unnecessary, particularly when these pupils must stay in education or training until the age of 18. Other countries have introduced online testing in both primary and secondary schools, illustrating how England is failing to keep up with the best innovations.
Ultimately, any mention of a level playing field will ring hollow until the government treats every course and institution fairly
Second, the lack of a ‘level playing field’ between academic and vocational exams has been plainly apparent for decades. Government ministers from different parties have talked endlessly about their desire to put technical education on a par with academic education, yet the way that government holds schools to account shows that they continue to prize academic qualifications above all else. Secondary schools are measured on how many 16-year-olds pass exams in a very specific basket of academic qualifications with little consideration given to other courses, while A-level results at age 18 are placed on a pedestal above other qualifications such as BTECs and apprenticeships. The government even judges the performance of specialist technical colleges using the same skewed approach. Ultimately, any mention of a level playing field will ring hollow until the government treats every course and institution fairly.
Third, our exam system promotes an astonishingly narrow curriculum. Only 4.4 per cent of A-level students now study more than three subjects. This limited breadth makes England an outlier by international standards, as most other developed nations such as France, Germany and Ireland insist on a broad curriculum right up to the end of secondary education and often make their first language, maths, science and other subjects compulsory for all students. Similarly, allowing 16-year-olds to select just one BTEC or technical subject for the next two years of their education is just as lamentable.
Ultimately, our exam system has some commendable features such as rigorous curricula and assessments in many subjects, but that does not hide the distinct lack of ambition around what the system could and should deliver for learners and society as a whole.