When public concern about this year’s GCSE exam results first became evident immediately after their releases on 23rd August, a friend of mine, who is in an English teacher, said that she thought the whole furore might prove to be a storm in a teacup.
Well if it is a storm in a teacup, it’s turning out to be a pretty big teacup. A month later the story is still running and developing. In fact the pace of this story has been increasing in the last couple of weeks, as the following news stories show:
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28 Aug – Parents of pupils at Golden Hillock School hold a protest outside the school about the GCSE results. (Actually parental protest about schooling seems to be quite big in the West Midlands this year. Check out a couple of other examples, nothing to do with GCSEs, here and here.) 11 Sep – Pupils in Wales are to get their GCSE English results re-graded. 17 Sep – Gove announces that GCSEs in ‘key subjects’ are to be abolished and replaced by a new set of exams, the so-called English baccalaureate (Ebacc) by 2017. 19 Sep – The Guardian newspaper devotes its entire letters page to the ‘reform’ of GCSEs. All but one of the 18 letters are critical of Gove’s proposals - and the exception was a letter written by a coalition MP! 21 Sep – Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme Any Questions, Lisa Jardine expresses the view that exams at 16-plus are simply unnecessary. She receives a round of applause. 22 Sep – It’s reported that local authorities, teaching unions and schools are mounting a legal challenge to the refusal by OFQUAL to regrade the English GCSE results. 23 Sep – The Observer newspaper reports that professional musician and music teachers are expressing concern that the Ebacc could lead to the demise of music and other creative subjects in schools. |
So why I am I writing about all this in this blog? What has the GCSE furore got to do with how people really learn?
First, let me say that I have nothing against exams as such. Like rats and bacteria, exams are OK in their proper place. It’s only when they take over the environment to the detriment of everything else that they become a problem. Now exams and tests do indeed seem to have taken over to the detriment of just about everything else in schools. We have a plague of exams and tests, just as dangerous as plagues of rats in earlier centuries. What’s really encouraging about what has happened over the last four weeks is that it is the first sign that the exam edifice is crumbling. The public are beginning to reject the dominance of exams and to see through the claims that exams represent some sort of scientifically objective and expertly standardised measure of learning. How can the system claim to be scientific and objective when a pupil on one side of the English-Welsh border will now be awarded a grade C for a GCSE ‘performance’ identical to what would earn a D on the other side of the border? The fact that exam results are open to such blatant political manipulation just detracts even further from their credibility. The parental protests in Birmingham, the applause on Any Questions for the proposal to abolish exams at 16-plus and the legal challenges to this year's results are all evidence, I think, that people are beginning to realise that there is something dysfunctional about how we assess learning and that there is more to education than tests and exams. These still have a place, but portfolios of what learners have created, and narrative descriptions of how learners have worked collaboratively are essential if we are truly to understand and assess real learning.
In one of the 18 letters in the Guardian we read that:
All examination systems are artificial constructs which reflect the aspirations and values of society.
I do hope that the eventual outcome of the GCSE/Ebacc farce will be that our aspirations and values will come to embrace a far richer and wider understanding of learning than can be captured through exam and test performance.
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