To think summer is not the best time for exams ( and so many of them).

[malificent7]

So the weather is glorious, its hard to concentrate because of the heat, sleep is poorer generally and everyone wants the beach. Plus it's the law that as soon as the last exam is over it rains as it did the day of my last a-level 20 odd years ago.

Why not have exams in February or November...both rubbish, cold months with nothing better to do?

As an aside...dd has so many gcse mock exams...English is now lang, lit, speaking etc. Too much pressure.

How about thinking outside the box and changing the academic year? There's no good reason why the academic year continues to be September to June, in fact no good year why we need an "academic year" at all. Why not just have three terms per year (schools and unis), with exams at the end of each term - so more of a "subject per term" rather than "subject per year". Break things down into modules instead of years/subjects. Then the likes of GCSEs, A levels and degrees can be a combined "score" of all the modules you've taken over the past 2/3 years. That dilutes any negative effects of heat/flu season/hay fever/fasting, or whatever by spreading exams over the year.

At the end of the day, if we suddenly scrapped the entire school/uni/education system and started again with a clean sheet, we wouldn't re-create the existing system, would we?

It's not like the kids need the whole summer off to bring in the harvest anymore is it?

I think most students would benefit from, say, a term of teaching followed by a week of revision/exams. Then new topics for the next term, following by a week of revision/exams. It seems a bit pointless to exam someone on something they learned several months (or a year or two ago), causing a lot of wasted time in revision etc, which wouldn't have been necessary if they'd been formally examined closer to the time they learned the content.

No time is ideal.

Autumn? They've just had 2 months off. They haven't been studying, they haven't seen teachers.
Winter? Viruses. Bad weather.
Spring? What will they do for the two months of school afterwards?

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

I thought when school exams had a substantial coursework element there was evidence that some teachers and parents were doing a lot of the work for the candidates? Not very fair on those whose parents can't/won't help.

Coursework was the problem, and still is with things like art/tech projects.

Don't see the problem with a style of modular content/subjects - after all, it's what Unis do and I believe some other countries do modules in secondary school to "accumulate" school leaving certificates etc. You can break down subjects into modules with their own exams which obviously will have narrower content, need less revision, etc., so would suit a lot of pupils better than broad exams after 2/3 years covering the entire 2/3 year content.

So dumb it down even further than it already has been?

Whilst teach-test-teach is what generally happens in lots of subjects throughout secondary school, more spoon-feeding is going to lead to even more students getting into university. There are already too many.

But why have two months off in Summer? Yes, under the current system, June is as good as any time, but why are we assuming the school year and exam content should stay the same??

We had this discussion in our house recently as we have DC doing GCSEs and A levels here. One idea was to change the school year to January-December and do the exams in November but then they realised they wouldn't have their lovely long summer.

The conversation started as I pointed out they hasn't done quite a much revision as they should have done because the weather was so nice they just wanted to go out and enjoy it!

Oh Christ on a bicycle, what’s next in mollycoddling?? Exclude bad weather and good weather and all of December because your poor darlings might be too excited about Xmas and any time around the clock change and we’ll end up with about 2 days a year when we might ask our precious adults to do anything. What a way to run a society.

Well, global warming is going to mean summers are soon going to be on a par with southern Europe, and the reason they close in June is because of the weather.

I work in a summer residential course in Kent in July and August and have seen a massive change in the weather in the years I've been doing it. It used to be the case that the international kids would arrive all suntanned and shivering, and complain about British weather. Last couple of years we've had them complaining the classrooms are too hot and we've had to adapt excursions because of weather alerts. We were inspected in 2018 and one of the points raised in the report was that the week the inspectors came our classrooms were 37 degrees with fans and in some cases, aircon.

The only change I can see happening, frankly, will be the opposite. A shorter academic year, maybe less time off during the year, and a longer summer holiday, so exams staying the same, but with fewer weeks off during the year.

There isn't an ideal time of year. February would be dreadful for illness, and I'm not sure November a lot better.

I love the idea that coursework in school means no cheating. Are you actually thinking of them doing course work on individual desks with no talking allowed to stop that... oh, do you mean exam conditions... in which case why not do exams?

I remember doing our maths coursework (early days of GCSE) and on one of the coursework, despite only doing it in class and not meant to talk to each other, one student discovered what she thought was a equation that solved the lot. Amazingly by the next maths lessons all her friends had "discovered" the same equation. By the one after, most of the class had found it.
Only problem was that there wasn't an equation that solved the lot.

Kids should be given a bottle of water with the label removed in each exam for more than an hour, they sit.

February would be terrible if there was snow

Is this for real? How will the poor little mites cope in the dreadful heat!? 😆 Good lord, it's not that hot! And people from other countries manage it a variety of extreme temperatures!! 🤦🏻‍♀️

I agree that there are too many exams, especially at age 16. Leaving certificates (as in Ireland), or even the old school certificate, of something like 5 main subjects and a couple of others, I think has merit.

Any time of year has its drawbacks.

Exams should start two weeks before Spring term ends, then continue after the break, end by mid-May. Results should be back to students the week before school finishes in July. Allows the students to plan their next moves without it all being last-minute in August and enjoy summer break without the stressful wait for results. They could spend summer focused on future plans, knowing where they are going to Alevels or uni or apprenticeships or work.

🤣🤣

This! It always amazes me how previous generations manage to cope but for some reason the poor little mites of today shouldn't be expected to!

Of course they can cope, but there's nothing wrong with thinking how things can be done better.

I do think the school holidays in England come too late. June/July off would be better, back in August. For those in exam years, done and dusted in May.

And yes, more coursework, modular exams and open book exams.

What exactly would they be learning in school?
How exactly would you make teenagers attend when they had completed their exams?
Where would the extra time to teach the children come from? Many Subjects teach until Easter and then revise afterwards.

Exams would need to reflect the amount of teaching time available before the exam happens. Just like they do now.

To suggest there is nothing left to teach unless a public exam happens at the end, is a very sad view of education. This is a great time to go in-depth into areas of the subject not covered by the exam board, perhaps research projects into areas of particular interest to that student or a group of students - very easy to imagine in history, literature, geography, biology, chemistry, physics. Also: dance, drama, art, sport, cooking, learning to drive (imagine everyone passing the theory test in school!), day trips, organised hikes (could be urban)... I bet, given 6 weeks of time to deliver their own curriculum, schools would come up with something amazing. If they had the time and the freedom to do so.

Sorry @SpareHeirOverThere I'm just jaded. I do agree that education needs a massive overhaul and I don't think that children get a good education any more , I was thinking about how it would work within our current ideological and funding system. (Although I stand by the fact that getting teenagers to attend after exams would be an uphill battle)

We were saying exactly this yesterday. Always seems to be a mini heat wave and ultra high pollen count.

Yes did mine that 40 years.

American here, and I could moan for hours about how the antiquated exam culture here needs a complete overhaul, but that's a rant for another day.

Admittedly, I am finding the whole idea that you have just a few weeks to finalise uni plans from the point you have your exam results in hand. It just doesn't make any sense. American students know months in advance, usually committing to a uni by March for a August/September start.

The UK education system is like the NHS. We're just trapped by the past and can't do things differently. All we get is constant "reform" that costs a fortune and wastes huge amounts of time, but we don't really change things - it's just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Just look at other countries - few have an education system like ours, few have a health system like ours. We need to wake up and smell the coffee, and realise that there's a reason that other countries havn't copied the UK!

I've said it on here in the past, but I couldn't believe it when our son started primary school, and then started secondary schools. In the 35 years since I was at school, nothing's changed. It was like a walk back in time at school open days, then parents' evenings, etc. The World has changed dramatically in those 35 years yet schools seem to be frozen in time. Mostly the same subjects, mostly the same subject content, even the teachers "look" the same, similar clothing, similar demeanour/attitude, etc. Look at any other workplace and it's completely different. Yet, say, a school woodwork/metalworks workshops are exactly the same - could be a museum - and the same display case with the same wooden fishes, the same pencil cases, the same trowels, the same "blocks on stick" games. Sorry, I lie, not everything is the same - they now have smart boards attached to a computer instead of the overhead projectors and white boards! But I stand by my clothing comment - my lad's first form teacher at secondary school wore a sports jacket with elbow patches - something you literally never see anywhere outside of a school - presumably now some kind of fashion statement rather than a necessity of prolonging the life of an old jacket!

The "Summer" problem is, of course, worsened by no longer being able to do November resits. Back in my day, you could resit anything in November - any subject, either GCE or A level. I believe that's no longer possible these days and November resits are very limited. That's a massively retrograde step backwards, as it the difficulty in sitting GCSE or A levels at colleges outside of a particular college course. Only a couple of decades ago, most FE colleges did evening classes for most GCSE and A levels - aimed at adults, but 16-18 year olds could also do them, alongside school, if they wanted to do a subject that school didn't teach, or do a resit and needed a bit extra teaching. All that seems to have disappeared which is a real travesty.