Flick Drummond MP: I don’t believe that GCSEs are the right way to assess our children now they are remaining in education and training until 18

[JuliaMumsnet]

Flick has been the Member of Parliament for Meon Valley since December 2019. She is also a Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Flick has been a school governor at Milton Park Primary School in Portsmouth and has a keen interest in education.

"I don’t believe that GCSEs are the right way to assess our children now they are remaining in education and training until 18. When young people left school at 16 and went into work then I could see the rationale behind having exams at that age but not now. This is something I am passionate about. I fear too many of our children are being left behind by a narrowly focused inflexible exam conveyor belt that tests memory and does not allow children the flexibility to choose to study what will be useful to them in their careers.

As a former lay Ofsted inspector and school governor, I have seen first-hand how many children are disengaged and set up to fail by high stakes GCSE exams, not to mention the disruption and damage to mental wellbeing that comes from something that is now nothing more than a milepost for young people as they move into adulthood.
Wouldn’t it be better to have a 14-18 curriculum?

I have made these points several times now. In summer 2020, I wrote a report on 4-18 education for the One Nation Conservatives along with Cherilyn Mackrory who concentrated on early years. You can read that report here.

And last week I put the reasoning behind my views further during a debate in parliament. You can see my speech here.

The government is not with me at the moment but I am hopeful this will change. Many in education are starting to take the same view as mine. But most importantly, I would like to take the opportunity to hear the views of Mumsnet users.

I have two recommendations. The first is on the extended school day and the second is a 14-18 curriculum without the interruption of GCSEs at 16.

The extended school day is being looked at by the government and many schools are already doing it within existing budgets. It makes sense because the majority of families have both parents working and childcare is expensive. An extended school day is about bringing in those activities which cannot be normally fitted into a school day. Subjects like music, art, drama and various clubs. It is not to say that music, art and drama are not academic subjects but many young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, cannot fit them into a school day, or their family cannot afford after school clubs.

Enriching the curriculum and school day will have a big impact on the breadth of knowledge and engage those who struggle in other lessons. Where it is already in place, teachers do their marking and preparation time during the day and go home to enjoy family time or other activities rather than school work. It is a better use of school buildings too.

The other area that I would like your views on is assessment. Just over 600,000 young people take GCSEs each year and around 200,000 do not pass at Grade 4 and above - a huge number.

I am not against exams or assessment but would it not be better to have a ‘school leaving certificate’ or portfolio, or whatever we want to call it, which would show whether the young person had achieved the standard in either academic, vocational, apprenticeship or a combination of any of them including a transcript of what else they have achieved like the National Citizen Service or the Duke of Edinburgh’s award?

Any diploma or certificate would include English and Maths until 18 but would make sure that the content is relevant to whatever the young person is interested in to engage them. High stakes exams like GCSEs do not give schools and young people these options.

As I said, these ideas are gaining traction. There are five commissions in the same vein, three have been published - the House of Lords Commission, the Independent Assessment Commission funded by the NEU and the Times Commission - and there are more to come.
Each will come from a different approach and I am sure that we will not all agree with every recommendation but I think one of the areas that we can all agree on is that we need a broad, knowledge-based education system that sets up a life-long love of learning and gives the skills that will help young people tackle whatever is thrown in their way.

It should be a curriculum that engages. I have been impressed by University Technical Colleges (UTCs) which have a 14-18 curriculum that motivates young people who are interested in a more technical education - most go onto read engineering or science at university or go into higher level apprenticeships straight from school. They also have an extended school day until 4.30pm when teachers go home without any work.

The other important point, as the House of Lords and Times commission have found, is that ‘skills gaps and shortages are clearly a major drive of youth unemployment and damage labour market productivity’. The Times Commission’s interim report was very focused on asking employers what they are looking for and they would agree that young people are not coming out of education with life skills that help in the workplace. The Department for Education’s Employers’ Skill Survey’s findings from the CBI and other organisations like the World Economic Forum all point to employers looking for skills like problem solving, communication, self-management, team working, creativity, numeracy and digital skills. These are not soft skills that come at the expense of knowledge. Knowledge is only useful where individuals have the skills to interpret and communicate it.

Lastly, but just as important is the mental health of young people. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge University, has done a huge amount of research into how teenage brains develop. She says high stakes exams put a huge pressure and stress on teenagers, reducing motivation during a critical time of development. The yearly Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report raised young people’s mental health as an issue. In 2018, children (aged 15) in the UK had the greatest fear of failure and the lowest life satisfaction in school of children across 24 European countries. The 2021 report found that school, friendships and appearance continue to cause the greatest dissatisfaction in adolescence. And in the Children’s Commissioner’s Big Ask Survey, young people highlighted that high stakes exams or assessment related stress remains a significant concern to them.

It would be great to hear what you think!"

Coursework is totally unacceptable as a means of assessment of the 16+ (or 18+).

Exams are, of course, nothing like the ‘real world’. There’s no job (that I know of) where the standard of your performance boils down entirely to a one-shot, time-pressured, closed-book, offline, long-hand scrawled regurgitation of pre-learned material. It’s to some extent a total nonsense. But still the least bad approach. Crucially, what you get is the candidate’s own work, pure and undiluted.

If you accept assessment based on coursework then you unapologetically accept that you’re moving a very long way from the candidate’s efforts and towards the efforts and opinions of others.

With teacher marking of coursework, you enter into the murky world of bias (conscious and unconscious) and of ‘influencing’ by parents & kids. What teacher wouldn’t be at least partly influenced by the likelihood of appeal or other challenge when deciding on a mark?

With (hypothetically) centrally marked coursework, in this day & age you’d quite possibly be talking about GCSE coursework farms springing up all over (e.g.) India & China. I say this as someone who recently hired an overseas candidate based on, amongst other things, a really careful read-through of their university dissertation. Months down the line, based on repeated exposure to their written work, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that the person I hired & the author of the dissertation cannot possibly be one and the same, it’s inconceivable. And this is in a relatively specialist field where, actually, there aren’t that many people who could help out. At GCSE level there are worldwide millions of people, many of them relatively low-paid, who’d be more than happy to.

More importantly, in either case, differing levels of resource and consequently ‘help’ from teachers would see the gap in results between privately (including through tutors, with 1:1 help probably being the best way to rig coursework, it could easily be done in a way that gets past even class teachers) and state schooled candidates would stretch out to become an impossibly vast chasm.

@puffyisgood by that logic universities should abandon essays and dissertations too...

That said, back in the 80s when I did my A levels in Holland, there was very little coursework. What we did have were internally moderated and sampled exams - sat under exam conditions. The averaged (weighted) mark for these was half the final mark. The other half came from the national exams at the end of the year. Holland has no exam boards, all exams are run by the state so everyone sits exactly the same papers for their course. And it's run not for profit.

The internal exams were far harder and that was intentional, the idea being that the nationals would feel like a walk in the park by comparison if you'd done the work.

I'm a parent of primary and secondary aged children, their schools despite being well regarded by Ofsted are uninspiring and monotonous in terms of curriculum content in order to teach to the test. I would not trust the day to be more interesting if it was longer. They can now choose late afternoons and early evenings to do clubs of their choices, sometimes more than one a day, to develop their own interests. My friend's son is an elite athlete and the school time leaves him flexibility to train. For parents who need the childcare, all schools offer after school activities.

Meanwhile, the government could investigate what about their recruitment policies causes such a low retention rate within the teaching profession. Pay? Conditions? Lack of resources? Interference in their professional roles by overenthusiastic amateurs?

As an A Level teacher, I agree. Students are not taught how to learn at GCSE now, just to pass exams in the interests of reasonable grades (for the school mainly imo). When students start sixth form they really struggle to think for themselves. A 14-18 curriculum would make much more sense if it were carefully planned and choices were open at least until year 12.

The school leaving age in the UK is still 16. There is no overarching system to effectively follow up students post 16.

I've worked in FE for the last 15 years. I remember when compulsory education to 18 was first proposed and the panic that ensued over the basic logistics - Where do we put the students, who will teach them? This has faded with the realisation that compulsory education and training to 18 in this country is notional at best.

As the system stands, doing away with GCSEs will mean many kids leaving school with no formal qualifications. It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to make this a realistic proposal.

Yet another headline grabbing statement from someone with little knowledge of the immense challenges currently facing schools across the country

Bring it on ..... fewer unnecessary exams.

Why are you combining a change in assessment with enforcing extended hours as free childcare? Is this actually more to do with making women with small children work full time and therefore reducing the amount paid on benefits than actually improving children's outcomes? And with thousands of childminders instantly losing money, where are the jobs they can do? After school care is an essential way of increasing their income with the ratios on younger children. Will the government be compensating them?

What actual experience do you have in the state sector with secondary school students? Strolling into a little primary school at 6.30pm for a two hour meeting is not the same as managing a huge site with poor surfaces, limited lighting and no funding to improve it and 2000 students milling around in the dark. How are you paying to improve the sites to make them safe in the evening for large numbers? You're going to need night vision security cameras for a start. Around every dead end, secluded area, side of a classroom, gate, fence, everywhere a member of staff would be able to see and monitor in person during the day. Because secondary school students are not cute little children, they're young adults and have different behaviours, especially when deprived, tired, hungry, overworked and have been either on the way to school, in school or on the way home from school from before 7am until after 6pm.

There are legal limits upon the length of day teenagers can work because it's been found to be too much for them even in holiday periods. Why is their school day being extended past that limit - or is that the next step, to remove protections upon them working?

@orchardgirl4

Please no, to extended school days. School days are long enough as they are. Family time, in my opinion, is more valuable and precious. Children are only children for such a short time. Let them play. Let them be children. They are already enough. Yes to ditching GCSEs. Too many exams. Use coursework to evaluate progress.

I agree with not extending school days. Kids (and teachers) will lose concentration and motivation. No extra learning will happen.

However, I disagree with your point about making all subjects coursework based. This opens up the risks of cheating. Schools, especially private schools, will “help” too much. This will widen the gap between privileged private school dc and state school dc. I think we should reduce the content and number of exams, but still keep exams. Especially for core subjects.

The National Curriculum at KS2 needs a massive overhaul. Changes made by Gove have been SO damaging. The standards for "expected level" at the end of primary school are ridiculously high and unrealistic for so many pupils. Children are being set up to fail primary school - how can this be acceptable?? There is no continuity between KS2 and KS3 - eg all that high level grammar, an insistence on joined-up handwriting (how can a child with excellent language and comprehension skills be judged "working towards" based on this??).

I also agree that high stakes exams at both 16 and 18 are unnecessary.

Our current education system is not serving our children and society - change is essential!

Firstly staying in education till 18 years old isn’t set in stone. You can just leave.
Dd went to work and Ds went to college to do a trade course.
However although he finished the level 2 course in his first year top of his class he wasn’t able to take the level 3 course because he doesn’t have an English GCSE. His whole class was in the same position. No GCSEs, no qualification.

How would not taking GCSEs be regarded in the college setting where you need English and Maths GCSE to qualify to become a plumber/plasterer/bricklayer etc.

How would that work (and why would having the ability to analyse a poem make your plastering smoother or affect how you fitted a gas boiler)

I agree. The old GCEs were for people leaving school at 16. They used to be highly enough thought of that with 5 GCEs including Maths and English you could get a start in a good job.

Now they simply cause disruption. Children have barely got to senior school when they have to drop important subjects and make choices which will affect the rest of their lives long before they necessarily know what they want to do. They also lead to children having to stop valuable subjects like art and music if they want to aim for something requiring academic subjects at university - all for the exercise of getting GCSEs. Children need to be able to be in an uninterrupted flow.

One problem with dropping GCSEs however would be that at present universities use them to sift applications pre-A levels, and alongside A levels, to get a full picture. Very able children tend to achieve top marks across the full range of subjects.

The provision for less academic young people is seriously lacking and totally underfunded, from what I saw during my PGCE (I didn't continue in teaching). In the absence of a well-regarded and properly documented school leaving qualification for those students that they want to achieve, being in a classroom is a painful experience for everyone present. A disrupted lesson is a hour wasted times the number of bodies in the room.

100%. There’s nowhere near enough vocational options at school available and in my experience, are only available to people who are predicted to be low attainers at GCSE. I wasn’t allowed to take hair and beauty because I was predicted straight A’s, i achieved precisely zero A’s. Plus all GCSE’s are evidence of is how much you can remember.

Another problem with GCSEs is the lack of flexibility/choice. Different schools have different "rules" as to subject choice, i.e. some insist on at least one MFL, one humanity, one science, or one "tech" subject, others don't let you take more than one MFL or humanity or force everyone to take combined science. Yes, I know that's down to teacher availability/timetabling, but it limits pupil choice.

My DS had to choose between Music and a second humanity - he couldn't do what he wanted which was computer science AND music. (they were both in the same object box and nowhere else). He was also forced to do REP (or whatever the GCSE is called) because he was in the top set for Maths - heaven knows how that's logical!

You don't have to extend the school day to fit in art, music, drama, and technical education. Any school can fit that into their normal school day capably, provided that they are appropriately funded for the specialist teaching time. I'm pretty sure many private schools already manage to do exactly that already. Perhaps you could ask them how they manage to do it.

And it does have to be a specialist teacher: a classroom is not an environment that any keen musician or studio art graduate can just waltz into and handle.

Having schools charge families a fee so that their kids can attend what is meant to be a state-funded school, in order for them to do things like art, drama, and music during the school day, will not be a benefit to any families that are already financially stretched. There is a cost of living crisis going on. How will families already white-knuckling it to payday be able to afford it?

I agree that British society is far too myopic about exam results. There was a real shit-fit on Mumsnet the day teacher-assessed grades were released during the pandemic. Every kid who earned an A average must have had their grades inflated. Every kid who qualified for medical school that year was surely too dumb to handle the course load. How could we possibly know who is "the best" if we didn't grade on a curve? We might have to actually interview people in depth, rather than read a piece of paper, tick a few boxes, and call it a day. 🙄

I live in Scotland, but the fixation on exam grades, and the entrenched belief of them being the only measure of knowledge, is letting down a lot of kids who are eager to learn, but struggle to perform on tests. These kids can wind up stuck in school environments that actually discourage them from broadening their horizons, stretching themselves, and learning for the sake of learning. My stepdaughter is unfortunately in one of those environments.

I do wonder if more of her teachers actually would encourage learning for the sake of learning, and would be less inclined to teach exactly what the exam body stipulates they should, if their own performance as educators wasn't evaluated on the basis of their pupils' exam grades.

I don’t believe grades should be given according to a curve. Should be a set pass mark,

@XingMing

The provision for less academic young people is seriously lacking and totally underfunded, from what I saw during my PGCE (I didn't continue in teaching). In the absence of a well-regarded and properly documented school leaving qualification for those students that they want to achieve, being in a classroom is a painful experience for everyone present. A disrupted lesson is a hour wasted times the number of bodies in the room.

I don’t think it is even underfunded. It is approached as,

Your child is not academic

But they are good with their hands and want to learn a trade.

However in order to do anything with a trade or manual edge to it…. You have to be academic.

Then to cap it all the government look amazed that we don’t have enough trades people.

As I said on Ds’s level 2 course not one student was able to go onto level 3 and qualify.

Ds decided to try another course but was told he could only do level 1 courses as he wouldn’t manage level 2 without a GCSE.

He completed the course work for one aspect of the level 1 course in one lesson.

There seems to be an attitude that if you can’t pass a GCSE then you can’t do anything. All it means is you can’t do the GCSE.
You might not be great in writing essays about an uprising that happened many years before. It doesn’t mean you can’t weld pipes together or tile a bathroom etc

More emphasis needs to be given to those who want to do a more practical course and not have it linked with academic achievement

@livinthedream1995

100%. There’s nowhere near enough vocational options at school available and in my experience, are only available to people who are predicted to be low attainers at GCSE. I wasn’t allowed to take hair and beauty because I was predicted straight A’s, i achieved precisely zero A’s. Plus all GCSE’s are evidence of is how much you can remember.

But even hair and beauty to qualify in you have to have GCSEs

There are no longer any courses where to qualify you have to be academic

My Dh left school without an O level in English.
He has a law degree and is qualified in 2 other professions.

Now his choice would be severely limited. No A levels with out an English GCSE
No law degree without A levels

Nowadays he would be destined to do warehouse work instead of a corner city office.

@borntobequiet

I forgot. Value teachers and give them the respect, time, tools and other resources they need to do their jobs properly, including safe environments that meet at least minimum workplace standards.

This.

The thought of yet more politicians interfering with schooling, having no real, recent experience of schools and damaging the morale of the teaching staff fills me with dread.

@Rummikub

I don’t believe grades should be given according to a curve. Should be a set pass mark,

I fully agree.

I agree with the MP that the English curriculum narrowing post 16 is not desirable, but there are ways around that. Otherwise...

I am American -- for decades we have had the '"leave school before 18 you will have zero qualifications. Must have english & math lessons until the end, one final diploma" system. We don't have important exams at 16 either (except sometimes, for those determined to be on university path).

Our system fails a lot of kids. I know a lot of people who dropped out at 15-16 & had to take GED path instead (or nightschool ,etc). Some never get their high school diploma.

I always thought that GCSEs at 16 was genius for kids who struggle to stay engaged, it gave them something to hold onto, a reason to stick in there just long enough. The targets were tangible & let them get something even if they can't pass exams in everything

Should Invest money into getting more kids over the 4 threshold in GCSE math/English. The target isn't unreasonable, but the resources available fail many kids.

Should Invest money into better training pathways & employment opportunities for kids who don't continue mostly classroom learning after GCSE

@schoolsoutforever

As an A Level teacher, I agree. Students are not taught how to learn at GCSE now, just to pass exams in the interests of reasonable grades (for the school mainly imo). When students start sixth form they really struggle to think for themselves. A 14-18 curriculum would make much more sense if it were carefully planned and choices were open at least until year 12.

Yes, this is exactly the issue my stepdaughter is experiencing in Scotland too. Everything is taught to the test. Everything. Her biology course at N5 was a literal repeat of the lessons she'd gone over at N4 level (which has no exam). She quit because she wasn't learning anything new, and couldn't stand the thought of spending a whole school year bored and waiting to pass a test.

DSD's best teachers find creative ways to actually teach around "what the SQA wants you to know", make their lessons relevant, and they actually draw out and develop her ability. Those are the teachers leaving thoughtful feedback on her work and giving her pointers on how to improve her thought processes. But most of her subject teachers just mark. I suspect the "just markers" are exhausted themselves, but in the meantime, my DSD is the one being let down.

The focus on achieving marks is so narrow that my DSD still needs a lot of coaching when she writes anything. Because no one seems to have had the time to teach language and structure. The focus is entirely on achieving points in a paragraph. She's 16 and still needs me to tell her "full stop here, comma there, this should be the start of a new paragraph". I tried to teach her a basic persuasive essay structure a couple months ago: something she'd even never heard of, and something that I spent four years learning and then refining between 14-18 when I was in high school in the States.

I'm curious to know how a high school teacher would run things, if they got to be in charge. What would stay, what would be scrapped, what would change?

@Rummikub

I don’t believe grades should be given according to a curve. Should be a set pass mark,

Without the curve, the grades become meaningless. One year’s grades would not be comparable to the next. Grade inflation would be a greater issue with governments keen to promote the idea that education is improving. It also offers some measure of protection against individual schools inflating grades if there is ever a repeat of teacher assessed grades ( although the many private schools and some state schools who did inflate seem to have suffered no consequence). The curve protects the integrity of the grades. I laughed when I read that there would be a slightly longer day and teachers would be marking and planning and skipping off home with no work at the end of the day. A teacher’s job expands with each new initiative. We would be running the provision ( along with underpaid teaching assistants) I expect that pretty soon that provision would be under scrutiny ( targets, learning walks, planning to be submitted.. ). I work supply now to avoid all this. It is really no wonder there is a retention crisis.

I haven't read the full thread but wanted to add my opinion. The education system ad it stands is broken and we have failed to take advantage of the reset that the pandemic provided.

Education that progresses by age doesn't work now. Children should progress through educational stages by ability, mastering skills and knowledge. They should have the option to sit exams from 16-18 - when they are ready and use that to progress on to the best stage. Scrap GCSEs and A levels completely. Have a final portfolio that shows what children have achieved. Exams are a part of that for the academic subjects but are supported by actual vocational and creative subjects (nothing like BTECs where student spend years writing about a skill rather than practising it). Include more life skills, more cultural capital, more routes into the workplace. You wouldn't believe that most children believe that jobs are limited to those with a defining name - doctor, lawyer, footballer, chef.

Let children explore education and choose what suits them as individuals. Let's stop assessing fish on their ability to climb trees.