Maybe it’s not quite as upsetting as imagining Sir David Attenborough moving to Sky and fronting a new pole-dancing show called “Polar Planet”, but it does feel wrong that nice John Motson – the former BBC football commentator – now helps to promote a gambling business.
That said, I wonder what odds John could offer me on guessing the year when a GCSE grade 10 is launched. Not saying that it should happen. Just that it will. The only question is when.
It took six years for grade A* to come along, with the aim of supposedly rescuing the crème de la crème GCSE student from the rest. But I cannot see some ambitious new education secretary waiting that long before doing something similar with the new system. Leaving aside any educational benefit (which politicians are quite comfortable at doing), why stop at grade 9 when 10 sounds so much better? Why not have an “upgrade”? The iPhone X, the GCSE X – same difference in this “little Xtras” political world.
In fairness, the pressure to introduce a grade 10 will not just stem from government. There will be others calling for it, too, as the gloss inevitably starts to fade on grade 9. Level 9 may have been heralded as some largely impenetrable fortress but we can already start to hear the dull, thudding sound of today’s “only-the-best-grade-will-do” battering-ram beating at its gates.
GCSE grades 'will be turned up to 10'
Pressures within our increasingly exam-obsessed system – pressure from parents, league tables, etc – will mean that a steadily growing proportion of students will slip through the gates and into that grade 9 castle, mainly through an ever-growing amount of exam-savvy teaching, personal tutoring and top-grade revision classes. Yes, there is supposed to be a proportional limit, but watch it drift.
Those who deny that this will happen might take a look at what happened to grade A* – the proportion of the overall grades awarded this level rose by approximately 150 per cent. We can already see this starting to happen to grade 9. The number of students managing a full set of grade 9s in 2018 was over 700, just slightly exceeding the estimate of two predicted by Dr Tim Leunig at the Department for Education a little while ago.
So eventually the call will come for a higher grade, in a renewed attempt to discover (once again) the true exam elite. I would take a punt on 2022 being the year when students receive the first grade 10. And there is no reason to suppose that the process will stop there. Eventually, this same wacky-ebaccy system of ours will mean we have a grade 11, then a grade 12 and so on.
It will only stop when someone in power is wise and selfless enough to question whether this exam merry-go-round really is the best way of helping young people to gain a valuable education. And whether maybe this obsession might – on the contrary – be discouraging education from modernising and “upgrading” in more meaningful ways. For does anyone in 2018 really, deep down, believe that the future lies in inventions like the EBacc, in thousands of compulsory revision clubs, and in the futile search for more castles in the air?
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
