Increasing the frequency of assessment could provide a “fallback” for GCSEs and A levels in the future, a prominent figure at a leading exam board has suggested.

Tim Oates, research director at Cambridge Assessment - which runs the OCR exam board - said today that we need to “flood the education system with high-quality questions” to help “accumulate a picture of somebody’s attainment”.

This evidence could, in turn, be used as a “fallback” in case a student is unable to sit a final exam, he said.

Gavin Williamson: We’re ‘absolutely’ keeping GCSEs

Post-Covid education: Where do we go from here?

Tim Oates: ‘Much more’ assessment needed in primary schools

Mr Oates, who led the national curriculum review under the coalition government, was speaking at the World Education Summit this morning.

GCSEs and A levels: Call for more assessment

Asked for his view on “the future of terminal examinations as the main mark of attainment in England”, he said we must be “realistic” in considering: “What is an exam?”.

“An exam is just a set of questions - really well-chosen questions, which probe understanding, and from the responses we can make an inference about what a child knows and can do. That’s it, really,” he said.

“We just happen to organise them into exams because we’re bothered that everybody should be answering the same questions for the sake of fairness and comparability, but it’s best to ask them right at the end because then they will have completed the whole learning programme. But they’re just good questions.”

Mr Oates said that, by introducing more assessment, we can “accumulate a picture of somebody’s attainment” at different stages of their learning, which could support the use of terminal exams.

“Now, we’ve said from Cambridge that what we need to do far more is to flood the education system with high-quality questions,” he said.

“Many of them will look like traditional exam questions. And we can use technology to do that.

“And by doing so, we can gather evidence at different periods in learning programmes, and we can then accumulate a picture of somebody’s attainment - and we’re going to explore all the policy issues around this in the next few months, I think. We can decide how we want to use that accumulated evidence.

“Do we want to have it as a fallback, in case somebody can’t actually have a final exam, or do we want to use it alongside the exam?

“I certainly don’t think we should use it instead of exams, because a measure of asking questions right at the end of a learning programme, when people really have drawn everything together, remains sensible. How do we know it’s sensible? Because it really, really predicts later performance. So it’s a sensible thing to do.

“But if it’s overloaded, if it induces stress, if we’re doing too much of it at the same time, for sure we need to review that, and we are.”

Tim Oates was speaking at the World Education Summit. Tes is the official media partner for the event.