Have GCSEs had their day? Heads, teachers and employers want a rethink

Last month, GCSE exams in biology, Latin and media studies ran on the same day. The following day, pupils sat English literature, economics and classical civilisation. Teenagers taking this combination of subjects spent 10 hours in the exam hall over two days, writing solidly at a table, in isolation, against the clock.

It’s a strange ritual and as far away from what happens in everyday life as one could imagine. For many teachers and commentators, it is a method that is no longer fit for purpose.

One of them is Sarah Fletcher, high mistress of St Paul’s Girls School, in west London. She is part of a campaign group, Rethinking Assessment, which wants to break the “stranglehold” exams have on the entire system. It argues that the arms race for grades is brutal and is undermining teenagers’ mental health, that the notion of “raising standards” is redundant and that GCSEs necessitate that the bottom third fail.

“These exams aren’t really asking students to come up with solutions or to think for themselves,” says Fletcher. “Indeed, the mark schemes are so narrow in a bid to make marking as fair as possible, that they are effectively discouraging independent thinking and creativity.”

According to Fletcher and a slew of other state and independent heads, teacher organisations, MPs and education experts who want to see change, the skills that are being evidenced through GCSEs are not the ones that young people are going to need. And what’s more, pupils know it – leading to problems with motivation.

“Young people can see that the system doesn’t develop the things that they’re going to benefit from,” she adds. “In an increasingly challenging and fast-changing world, they need teamwork and collaboration, oracy and presentation, problems solving, really deep critical and interdisciplinary thinking, real-world engagement, authenticity. We talk about the importance of learning to improve through failure, and yet we’re presenting them with a set of exams where failure is not an option.”

That’s not the only reason for reform, according to the head. We know from the exam regulator Ofqual that marking is only accurate to within a grade one way or the other, yet we treat it as an exact measurement which opens or closes pathways to the future. That is simply not fair to young people.

So what is Rethinking Assessment proposing? Critics of the current system want to see a slimmed down number of exams at 16 – perhaps just maths, English, digital skills and science. This can ensure the Government has an accountability measure, as it does now, but without the enormous burden of exams in eight or more subjects.

This would free up teachers to develop more innovative forms of assessments that actively encourage the development of the skills young people need in the workplace.

In this alternative system, the Government would set out what it is it expects young people to know and be able to do but then allow schools some flexibility in how they deliver this.

“You allow schools to develop a suite of methods by which they can assess,” says Fletcher. “What the school can then do is put those together. If a school wants to teach pupils in a very linear form, it can do that. If a school wants to do something more interdisciplinary, you can do that, too. Each school is looking at its own cohort and community and putting it together, creating something relevant and inspiring.”

Fletcher would like to see groups of schools collaborate to design courses and quality assess what they do. Exam boards then become chief moderators, with Ofsted inspection on top. Project-based assessments might resemble the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), currently taken by many sixth formers, but at GCSE level.

St Paul’s Girls already does its own school-based assessed courses in music, art, drama, art history and computer science and creative technologies. Instead of offering GCSEs in those subjects, students complete a home-grown qualification that is externally moderated.

“These are really robust qualifications,” says Fletcher. “They’re qualifications which the students love because they’re motivating, they’re the right standard and they’ve got the right amount of stretch.”

But while this is all well and good at an independent school, which selects high ability pupils and charges its supportive parents £32,000 a year in fees, would this flexibility be possible, or even desirable, in a chronically underfunded state sector? Is it feasible when many maintained schools struggle to recruit teachers and when, in some secondaries, a sizable chunk of pupils is disengaged or actively disruptive?

Some commentators are dubious. While GCSEs are certainly imperfect, proposals for overhauling the system typically exaggerate the benefits while failing to acknowledge the costs, according to Sam Freedman, a senior advisor to multi-academy trust Ark and a former adviser to then education secretary Michael Gove.

“The last thing schools need as they deal with the after-effects of the pandemic and ever tighter funding is another assessment revolution,” he says.

Those with long memories might recall an expensive but startlingly short-lived overhaul of the system under Tony Blair to create “vocational GCSEs” as a skills-based alternative to academic lessons.

According to Fletcher though, reforming assessment need not disrupt the whole of the school curriculum. It does, however, need to recapture the imagination of the Covid generation, some of whom are turning their backs on what they are being served up.

“I see it everywhere,” she observes, “putting kids in a class and saying, ‘This is what we need to do to get through the exam.’ That is not critical thinking, it is jumping through hoops.”

What Fletcher and Rethinking Assessment would like to see is a “proper 10-year plan for education which is not politically driven but is put together by educationalists and which genuinely looks at the student and what they need.”

It will ask questions such as whether writing in exams is the best way for pupils to demonstrate what they know. What if they could instead create an app or make a website or curate an e-portfolio – using different communications platforms to present their ideas, weaving in digital tech to solve the problems?

“This is not about knowledge versus skills or about binning the curriculum,” says Fletcher. “It is about being imaginative with it. Allowing young people to explore things in different ways is increasing their knowledge, not decreasing it.”