Reform rather than revolution needed

Clumsy education reform – such as scrapping GCSEs - could set education in England back by a decade, a leading educationalist has told a Cambridge Assessment Network seminar.

In his talk, Looking to the future of assessment: What reforms are needed, and which could take us backwards? Barnaby Lenon CBE, Professor and Dean of Education at the University of Buckingham, explored the nature and purpose of exams and specifically the GCSE. He argued that the qualification – introduced in England in 1986 - served a variety of important purposes, including ranking pupils for employers, colleges and universities; marking the completion of a student’s education in the majority of subjects; motivating students and enabling reliable assessment of school performance.

He then went on to debate some of the reasons behind recent calls to abolish GCSEs. He said he recognised that “the high-stakes nature of exams has become a problem” but said this was not the fault of exams, but rather the way they were now used, whether by government, universities or society in general.

A former member of the board of the England exams regulator Ofqual, but speaking in a personal capacity, he acknowledged debate over the comparable outcomes approach to awarding of grades and how in the past this has led to concerns in some quarters that school or system improvement was not being recognised. However, he said the National Reference Test was beginning to provide a solution to this, enabling grades to rise if performance had improved.

Prof Lenon then debated some changes that could be made to exams. He said that a return to more coursework instead of exams was not the answer, arguing that in the past much coursework had proved “formulaic and dull”. Instead, he argued that considered reform of GCSEs should take place, particularly in English where he argued a new type of qualification is needed for those who have to resit at age 17. He added that other subjects could be developed or allowed to evolve – with computational thinking added to maths A Level, for instance.

He said that schools should also be empowered to recognise extra-curricular activities - perhaps devising their own type of diploma. He said qualities such as teamwork and critical thinking were also recognised in qualifications such as the Extended Project Qualification, which has been growing in popularity in schools.

Thanking Prof Lenon for his talk, Tim Oates CBE, Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s Director of Assessment Research and Development, said the seminar had been “a brilliantly succinct but wide-ranging journey through many of the issues, from different valuable perspectives, from your 40 years’ experience as an educator of young people as well as a participant in policy processes”.

He said Prof Lenon’s call for considered reform rather than abolition of GCSEs was timely, not least as Nordic countries – widely seen as having turned against formal, national assessment – are discussing a return to national exams.