These exams won’t ever come with a certificate and you won’t see them on a CV. Students don’t even receive individual results, in fact.
And yet, every year, 19,800 students sit these tests and their results have the potential to impact the results of every student in the country.
So, what are the national reference tests?
We spoke to Cath Jadhav, former director of standards and comparability at Ofqual, and Paul Newton, research chair at Ofqual, to get some insight into the design and execution of the tests.
What are the National Reference Tests (NRTs)?
The NRTs are two separate one-hour tests: one assesses English language and one looks at maths.
“They’re designed deliberately to match the content and style of the assessments for the newly reformed GCSEs,” explains Jadhav. “But they are exam-board neutral so they don’t favour one board over another.”
More on GCSEs:
Who sits the tests?
The tests are sat by Year 11s in March, in 330 schools. In those schools, 30 students are picked at random for the maths test, and 30 for the English test (the same children do not take both tests).
Jadhav says the schools are picked to get a fair representation of the different schools in England.
“Those schools are sampled on a basis of size, so we have a representative sample of schools of different sizes and previous results in those subjects,” she says.
“We have schools who have previously achieved good results, all the way down to schools who have achieved less good results.”
What are the questions in the test?
In order to accurately be able to compare results from the test year on year, the tests don’t change and the papers are kept confidential.
Another way they maintain confidentiality is by never allowing students to see all of the questions.
“Questions are chunked into eight different blocks and each student gets a combination of two blocks,” explains Jadhav. “So, over the range of students, you cover more questions than in a normal exam.”
Why do we do the NRTs?
The NRTs are a tool used by Ofqual to maintain standards over time.
“Because the questions don’t change, they give us really objective evidence of changes in the performance of Year 11 students,” explains Jadhav. “So, if they’re doing a little bit better, we can measure that.”
What do the NRTs tell us?
When Ofqual begins the awarding process (to agree grade boundaries after exams have been sat), it is important that decisions are made on reliable information.
If students have performed really well in an exam compared to previous years, it’s important to know if that is down to an improvement in ability or an exam that is easier than the year before.
“In normal exams, if students score more highly in exams, it might be ability or it might be that the questions are easier,” explains Jadhav. “It’s really difficult to disentangle. What the NRT gives us is a really clear measure of whether students are doing better.”
How does the process work?
Jadhav gives an example of when the NRTs helped Ofqual understand performance in the maths GCSE.
“In 2017, we saw an increase in GCSE maths grades at grade 7 and, from the NRT, we could see an increase in ability at grade 7 level, so we could see that increase was an improvement in ability rather than an issue with the exam,” she says.
What is the link between NRTs and standards over time?
Ofqual oversees awarding primarily to make sure that standards are maintained between exam boards and over time. However, Newton says it is also important that we recognise when student performance has improved.
“The NRT is an antidote to our use of comparable outcomes,” says Newton. “Comparable outcomes keeps things stable, but it isn’t very good when we want to recognise genuine change in the level of attainment in the cohort. It works on the default assumption that there is no change.”
So this is where the NRTs become useful, says Newton.
“We need really good evidence that standards have risen, and we look to the reference test to give us that really robust, dependable evidence,” he explains.
How are GCSEs adjusted based on the NRTs?
So far, no GCSE grades have needed to be adjusted based on the NRT. However, had exams gone ahead in 2020 - when many schools were closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic - there would have been a need to adjust based on the NRTs sat in March before the national lockdown happened.
“We identified that there was a statistically significant improvement in maths [in 2020], and this would have been the first time we put that into practice,” says Jadhav.
