Exam boards should consider stripping down A levels and GCSEs to their core content to “de-risk” carrying out public exams next year, a leading figure in the private schools sector has said

Simon Hyde, the general secretary of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), a body of elite UK private schools, said exam boards might need to adjust their content to reflect the reduced teaching time pupils had received in 2021.

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“Obviously the teaching time for this year for year thirteen and the year elevens has already been substantially cut into because they have experienced if you like more of a hit to their main teaching...a good number of students this year will have not only missed a fair bit of school last year but there is a serious possibility of further disruption this year,” Mr Hyde told Tes.

“If we want to de-risk examinations…one of the ways we can do that - also promoting fairness for people where perhaps their remote programmes have not been as good as in some schools…one of the things exam boards could do is to look for the core of their various specifications and their various subjects.

“So what are the fundamental things that need to be delivered? And then you could actually judge that on the basis of teaching time that you think most people will have received.”

He said if exam boards came to the “sorry conclusion” that pupils had only received 200 hours’ worth of instruction time (for A level they would usually have 480) they would need to “draw up a view of what can be achieved in that time in terms of meeting the core [subject components].”

He added that there could be additional elements which could be added to the specifications if there was less disruption to learning than anticipated.

And Mr Hyde said Ofqual had already started to make these considerations in their consultation over the summer, but “they really didn’t go very far at all with that, they tweaked the edges of that”.

And he said exam boards should be providing common end-of-term assessments for schools to use in case exams were cancelled in 2021 and teacher assessment was used to determine grades.

Boarding school lockdowns

Mr Hyde said localised lockdowns could affect pupils at boarding schools undertaking brief visits to parents, known as exeats.

“Obviously the idea of lockdowns and local lockdowns is something that is exercising colleagues, particularly of course in boarding schools, where let’s say your son or daughter returns home for a brief exeat over a weekend and there’s a lockdown imposed at that time, that could either mean you were stuck in your locality at home or conversely stuck in the boarding school without the ability to move,” he said.

On the subject of a national lockdown over the school half term, he said: “The issue with half term, of course, is different schools take half term at different times, so with a national process of lockdown I’m not sure how you would effect that - it’s just one of those other intangible difficulties that colleagues are having to think through.”