The balance of exams and assessment at secondary school is “completely wrong” and the curriculum is “too backward-looking”, according to the early findings of a review set up by a major exam board.
Former education secretary Charles Clarke has today shared the findings of an ongoing review that he is leading for the OCR exam board into the 11-16 curriculum.
The review has identified the need for assessment to be spread more evenly over students’ secondary school education, rather than the focus being entirely on “high-stakes” exams for 16-year-olds at the end of key stage 4.
Speaking at a Westminster Education Forum event today, Mr Clarke also said that the secondary school curriculum needed to be more forward-looking and contemporary in order to engage students.
Review of exams and assessment
And he added that the key stage 3 years, for students aged 11 to 14, should be “focused more rigorously on building the foundational skills, particularly in maths and English”. This would help students to move forward successfully to future study at KS4 and beyond, Mr Clarke said.
He suggested that an assessment could take place at the end of KS3 as part of this change.
The full findings from OCR’s review of secondary curriculum and assessment are expected to be published in September.
Mr Clarke, who was education secretary from 2002 to 2004 in Tony Blair’s Labour government, said he hopes the findings will assist the curriculum and assessment review that the new Labour government has announced.
For KS3 and KS4, Mr Clarke said: ”We feel the curriculum itself has been too backward-looking and it needs to be more forward-looking, first and foremost, to engage the interests of students themselves.”
He suggested that a more forward-looking curriculum would include more content on areas such as digital skills, climate change and sustainability.
“I think there’s quite a lot of evidence that the three years of KS3 are not being used as effectively as they could be to help children learn, for a whole variety of reasons,” Mr Clarke told the Westminster Education Forum event focused on the next steps for the 11-16 curriculum.
He said the review has concluded that maths should be described instead as “mathematical and data education”, to better incorporate foundational mathematical skills.
Mr Clarke added that English could similarly be defined more widely to include a “range of language and presentational skills”, and this approach could then be extended out to the humanities and sciences.
Rebalancing assessment
Regarding assessment, the review is set to suggest that the balance has “moved too far away from assisting the student to learn and too far towards sometimes misleading school and teacher accountability”.
The evidence that the review has seen also points to too much teaching and learning time being taken up by preparing for assessment, Mr Clarke said.
The full report will address, in detail, ways to reduce the assessment burden on students, but Mr Clarke said examples of how to do this include cutting the number of exams in particular subjects, taking some module exams earlier, reducing expectations on the number of GCSEs that students take, increasing the availability of fact sheets, and further developing teacher assessment.
Last year a House of Lords report called for major reforms to 11-16 curriculum and assessment. Peers said the current system overloads students and recommended that the government should significantly reduce the amount of external assessment of students at KS4.
Digital exams progress
Mr Clarke said a key way to reform the assessment system is with the development of digital exams - particularly for assessing foundational competencies in maths and English at KS3.
Regarding digital exams, Mr Clarke said that although concerns about schools’ infrastructure and teachers’ expertise in relation to digital assessment are “genuine”, these factors “do not, in our opinion, justify delaying the process of introducing digital assessment options where they can be effective”.
Digital exams could replace “much of the mock examination culture”, he added.
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