Students have digested their GCSE results, and teachers and schools are trying to make sense of the broader patterns. Is it too soon, then, to question the value of the qualification? Is it disrespectful to those who have invested so much in the enterprise?
Maybe - and yet within a fortnight a new cohort will have been launched on their GCSE courses. The perpetual-motion machine of credentialism precludes any real opportunity to pause and ask: really, what is the point?
Tellingly, the increasingly frequent and well-aimed broadsides against GCSE are met with routine and resounding silence - where are its doughty defenders?
Rather than rehearse the arguments against a battery of tests that take place at a point no longer marking the school-leaving age, and which by their sheer volume bend education completely out of shape (apophasis notwithstanding), let’s go back to first principles.
The problem arises out of the need to answer two rather different questions: how to mark the terminal standard reached by those students coming to the end of their time at school or college; and how to register the interim level reached by those who intend to stay on in formal education.
Employers and universities alike are increasingly looking to introduce customised means of identifying the best applicants. Surely this represents an opportunity for schools to free themselves from the shackles of an assumed imperative.
Testing ‘absolutely everything’
Currently, we feel bound by the need to test students on absolutely everything (hence the sheer weight of the exam burden across the curriculum), and to discriminate ultra-finely between candidates (hence the unedifying scramble to discriminate at the top end, first introducing A* and then replacing it with two numerical grades).
Those students who intend to go further in academic study are looking to drop subjects, and exams should serve simply to indicate that they have earned the right to specialise. It should be sufficient to record that a particular threshold has been reached.
These students derive no educational benefit from being subjected to time-consuming testing that covers the entire curriculum, including subjects that they plan to study in greater depth. The sheer weight of these assessments renders them at best obfuscatory.
For those intending on leaving formal education sooner rather than later, or who plan to move along a more vocational route, the problem with the current regime is both its timing (it doesn’t necessarily take place at the end) and its obsession with salami-slicing at the point of grading. Is that what employers really need? Or do they want some indication that an applicant has achieved a threshold standard in a few core subject areas?
That is obviously not everything they need in order to identify the best applicants, but it might be all that a national qualification should reasonably offer them.
It cannot be beyond the wit of experts in this field to design a lighter-touch assessment of threshold competencies in core areas, taken at the terminal point in a student’s studies. Exams should be about horizons, not hoops.
Dr Kevin Stannard is the director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets as @KevinStannard1
Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and like Tes on Facebook
