I have banged on before about the unintended influence of high-stakes exams on education. They encourage teaching to the test, rather than to the interests and abilities of the student, distorting pedagogy. Public exams in their current form bend schooling out of shape.
Exam reform, and the change and uncertainty that follow, have opened up a second front in the war on sustainable schooling. The focus on exam success is now more than ever crowding out other curricular initiatives and opportunities.
The reformed GCSEs come with added content, and they are designed to be harder in conceptual terms too. Some schools have responded by reducing the number of GCSEs typically taken by students, but performance measures and university expectations have limited the scope for cutting the examined curriculum down to size. GCSE courses now often last three rather than two years.
The newly minted A level specifications were not supposed to get bigger or harder, but in some subjects there does seem to be more content, and linearity inevitably adds to the ‘hardness’ of the course. A common response post-16 has been to clear the curriculum, reducing the number of subjects from four to three from the outset, and adding teaching time to A-level programmes. Enrichment and extra-curricular programmes have sustained collateral damage in this retrenchment.
Faced with a new set of goalposts the exact location of which is not yet entirely known, and with specifications that are both bigger and harder, the problem is how to fit it all in. If it can’t all be crammed into the scheduled lessons, it is tempting - it may well be seen as imperative - to add more time through catch-up, support and revision sessions. Some schools take pride in the provision of supernumerary support sessions, and inspectors seem to take the number of such activities as evidence of an enriched offer. But the cornucopia of clubs and clinics might be better seen as the manifestation of a malaise.
Concerns about stress and anxiety are certainly not allayed by filling every minute of an already packed day with additional learning sessions. To be sure pupils with special needs will require additional support, and others will need targeted intervention at particular points. But bolt-ons should not be routinely required of teachers or students just because the content can’t be covered in the scheduled time. If a specification is not deliverable in the timetabled time, then clearly there is something wrong with the specification and its assessment scheme.
Doing more is no substitute for doing better. Teachers who cover the course and deliver the goods in the scheduled time might fear that they look less committed when compared with colleagues who are seen to be squeezing in extra sessions, and who look like they are going the extra mile. Pupils who are not racing from classroom to clinic to club (and then getting a tutor outside school) might somehow feel that they are not taking the exams sufficiently seriously.
This also amounts to a serious and sustained assault on what little remains of the curriculum that isn’t tested in high-stakes exams. Yet it is in the interstices that some of the most exciting and innovative learning is taking place.
On this, at least, Socrates was wrong: the unexamined life is worth living.
Kevin Stannard is director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets @KevinStannard1
