After months of waiting, in early November the announcement finally arrived: the government confirmed that it was “firmly committed to exams going ahead in summer 2022”. No more confusion. No more teacher-assessed grades (hopefully).

While for many this was a welcome step back towards “normality”, the news was met with disappointment from others.

The tide of public opinion on GCSEs, in particular, was already beginning to shift long before Covid, with a number of influential figures lining up to denounce the qualifications. For example, Lord Baker, who was education secretary when GCSEs were introduced back in the late 1980s, said the qualifications should be “quietly put to sleep”.

During the pandemic, those doubts have spread. A recent YouGov poll showed that 89 per cent of teachers agreed that GCSE reform was necessary.

There are some very good reasons for having reservations about GCSEs. For one thing, we know that they are unfair. Government statistics show that GCSE outcomes have remained stable in recent years. In 2019, 67.1 per cent of the GCSE grades awarded were grade 4 - a standard pass - or above; in 2018, the proportion was 66.6 per cent.

Annually, around a third of young people will fail their GCSEs, with little chance of that figure improving. The need for comparable outcomes means significant improvement simply isn’t possible year on year.

As well as being inequitable, GCSEs are also skewed towards disciplinary knowledge, preventing schools from focusing on broader personal and skills development. The skills that are needed for life after school - such as oracy, creativity, collaboration, resilience and social and emotional learning - aren’t valued anywhere in the exams process. This is completely at odds with the priorities of employers, as set out by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, employers are increasingly ignoring GCSEs in their hiring processes.

And experts in child and adolescent mental health have also raised concerns, drawing links between high-stakes exams and the spiralling rates of mental health problems that we are seeing in schools. For example, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge, says that “it has become increasingly clear that holding high-stakes national exams in the form of GCSEs during a period of life characterised by increased vulnerability to mental health problems no longer makes sense, and that other forms of assessment might be better aligned with adolescent development”.

Considering the scale of the impact that Covid-19 and lockdowns have had on the mental health and wellbeing of young people, these concerns are particularly pertinent.

The counter to this anti-GCSE argument is often: “Well, what would you do instead?” Blank sheets of paper can be scary, and the disorientating experience of the past two years makes teachers rightly wary of a leap into the unknown.

But most of us calling for change understand that full-scale reform takes time; no one thinks that it would be sensible to scrap GCSEs overnight. And neither are we holding a blank piece of paper as an alternative.

Happily, there are different levels of radicalism, and reform-minded schools can learn from these ideas. Indeed, they can join the evolution away from the GCSE-only diet more quickly than they might think - without waiting for the government to lead the way with overarching policy changes.

So, what do those radical ideas look like?

1. Do fewer GCSEs, and do something more ‘real world’ with the time gained

It’s Progress 8, not Progress 9, so even those schools that have to submit to this particular accountability regime can create a slot for something else to vary the diet.

At School 21, in East London, for example, students take eight GCSEs, and use the ninth berth for real-world learning experiences for half a day each week. Projects are carefully planned with trusted partners, culminating in authentic outcomes with real value to the employer.

For example, two students spent time at the Department for Education redesigning its diversity plan; another group overhauled the children’s menu at a hotel; a third group worked with the Edge Foundation to overhaul its communications plan for young people.

2. Put other accredited courses into the options blocks

For those who want a more varied offering but still want the reassurance of an accredited qualification, why not look at other level 2 courses that are assessed in a broader way?

At The King Alfred School, in north-west London, students can choose the UAL (University Arts London) level 2 course in drama instead of doing a GCSE in the subject, for example. Journals, portfolios and practical work are taken into account alongside written work, although there’s no traditional written exam.

UAL runs an excitingly broad range of practical subjects at level 2, which are formally equivalent to four GCSEs but can be delivered in the time normally given to one.

The Higher Project Qualification (HPQ) is another great option for giving students a broader route to a level 2 qualification without sitting yet another exam. It’s the younger sibling of the better-known Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), which is increasingly popular at key stage 5.

Universities love the HPQ because it enables students to do sustained, self-directed work and develop the presentation skills that are increasingly part of the assessment regime in higher education. Students love it because they can get credit for working on something they’re really interested in, and they can present their work using a variety of media. It can even be done in teams, enabling students to develop their collaboration skills.

You can also look to college groups such as the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which runs around 50 university technical colleges that combine a core of traditional GCSEs with a flexible approach to other more technical qualifications. Like School 21 and XP School, in Doncaster, these colleges work directly with employers to ensure that gaining meaningful experience of the world of work is built into the rhythm of school.

3. Do fewer GCSEs, and develop your own non-accredited courses

There’s nothing magic about having nine-plus GCSEs. There are almost no higher education courses, nor jobs, for which this is a prerequisite in itself. Some schools have therefore taken advantage of this to plough their own furrow in the pursuit of a richer experience for their students.

For example, St Edward’s School, in Oxford, has students take seven or eight GCSEs and two or three internally written interdisciplinary courses. These courses range from design and entrepreneurship to global societies and environments; they’re assessed multimodally and moderated by university departments.

St Paul’s Girls’ School, in West London, takes a similar approach. A core of seven GCSEs is supplemented with a range of accredited and non-accredited alternatives, with a strong focus on tech and entrepreneurship. Again, multimodal assessment ensures that a wider range of skills are developed and recognised, and that not everything hangs on an “on the day” performance.

Bedales School, in Hampshire, has been running a range of internal courses - again assessed multimodally - for 15 years alongside a core of just five GCSEs. This long-running experiment is strong evidence that schools can exercise their independence without damaging students’ prospects. Its students have subsequently accessed the full spectrum of universities, including highly competitive courses, despite having a range of entirely non-accredited qualifications. Ucas lists them on its application pages.

4. Do far fewer GCSEs, and develop your own curriculum around the bare minimum

Students really only need passes in English and maths GCSEs (or equivalents) in order to be able to go on to higher education, if indeed that’s their pathway. Even then, if they don’t have those, they can often sit tests to demonstrate their competency in numeracy and literacy.

It’s easy to forget that universities and employers are well used to having people from other countries apply to them with a hodgepodge of different kinds of transcripts.

A University of Cambridge admissions tutor recently told me that if applicants have GCSEs, they’ll take them into account, and if they don’t, they will make every effort to try and understand what they have done instead.

Students who take the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme, for example, don’t go near a GCSE, have their learning assessed in a variety of ways (including an electronic portfolio) and go on to the prestigious and internationally recognised IB Diploma.

5. Write your own courses and get them accredited, or use other existing recognition frameworks

For the bureaucratically adventurous, there are ways to create your own courses and have them accredited by Ofqual. Organisations like Qualifi act as the awarding body for courses developed by their partners. This is big business in the world of professional courses, and there is no bar to schools getting in on the action.

Organisations such as City & Guilds endorse a range of centre-specific activities, and can reflect achievements within skills frameworks. AQA’s little-known but highly adaptable Unit Award Scheme can be used to give exam-board gravitas to your own in-school activities. Schools set their own criteria, decide when they’ve been met, and students get an AQA certificate once they reach the standards. No grading. No fixed point in time at which you have to meet the standards.

Alternatively, you can ignore external accreditation altogether, and explain your education in its own terms. The Acorn School, in Gloucestershire, for years eschewed all external examination, did things entirely in its own low-tech way, and sent nicely bound homegrown portfolios off to universities when students were 18. It successfully sold its own numeracy and literacy measures as GCSE equivalents, and gained places at university for every one of its students who applied. It is proof that admissions departments will take the time to consider each application on its own terms.

It’s notable that there’s a preponderance of independent schools in this list of innovators, which reflects their additional freedoms from the accountability structures and funding limitations of the state sector.

However, there are a couple of points to make about that.

Firstly, while the pressure of Progress 8 arguably makes it difficult for state schools to undertake radical change without jeopardising their league table position, this still allows for more flexibility than you might think. Within the constraints of Progress 8, it is relatively straightforward to offer eight GCSEs and use the ninth “slot” for something different, as outlined above.

Secondly, many of these alternatives are not costly. In fact, offering fewer than nine GCSEs may actually give you a chance to spend less money, providing you can come up with alternatives that aren’t staffing-intensive. The HPQ, for example, requires students to undertake quite a lot of self-directed work, so requires supervision rather than teaching. It would, therefore, not necessarily involve an additional staffing cost if you ran this as an alternative to a GCSE. Work experience, similarly, requires organisation but not teaching time.

Of course, there will be other hurdles to overcome. You’ll likely meet resistance from people who are used to doing things a certain way, for instance, and change will inevitably lead to staff turnover. Coupled with this are ongoing pandemic-related challenges that many schools are still grappling with. Those challenges might make the mere thought of introducing a different approach seem next to impossible.

But the pandemic and the process of awarding teacher-assessed grades has also given teachers a chance to engage directly in assessment in a whole new way and, for many, has reinforced their sense of professionalism. Claims of grade inflation are actually just the result of removing the wholly unfair principle of comparable outcomes and the achievement-limiting bell curve.

All over the country, teachers showed that they can make responsible, integrity-filled judgements about their students’ learning. This is something we need to capitalise on.

One thing we know for certain about exams in 2022 is that results won’t be comparable with previous cohorts’, and likely won’t be for several years to come. Beyond school, the stakes around results have already been lowered - universities and employers care less about results than they used to, recognising that they’re not a good predictor of success in the workplace. In short, there has arguably never been a better time to change.

Independent schools are already changing, and there’s a danger that they will steal a march by getting on and doing exactly the sorts of things that will advantage their students further. A group of independent school heads from within the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) has already been meeting to consider the future of assessment together (see box, below).

The pandemic has thrown assessment off course, and now every school leader has a choice to make. Do you strive as hard as you can to get back to where you were and just carry on? Or do you take this opportunity to experiment, and to find out what truly works best for your students and your context? I know which route I would prefer to take.

Alistair McConville is deputy head of The King Alfred School and co-founder of Rethinking Assessment (www.rethinkingassessment.com)

This article originally appeared in the 26 November 2021 issue under the headline “What are the alternatives to GCSEs?”