Imagine setting a challenge to one of the world’s most successful chefs, someone like Lorraine Pascale or Heston Blumenthal, testing their skill and knowledge, their creativity and innovation by asking them to create...
GCSEs used to be necessary. When they were introduced in the 1980s, many youngsters left the education system at 16 and needed a qualification at the end of their school career. Education, understandably, has changed in...
John DunfordFormer secondary head and general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, National Pupil Premium Champion and chair of the CIEA and Whole Education
My 10-point plan for covid-affected exams in 2021, published in September 2020, called for a fair system, with high-quality moderated internal assessment complementing external exams, or substituting for them if they are...
As a headteacher, I worked relentlessly to ensure that my most disadvantaged learners scored as well as their more fortunate peers in tests and exams, from Early Years goals, to SATs, GCSEs and A levels. And so did my...
My children have always hated asking me for help with schoolwork, so I was delighted when my daughter came to me with her assignment on the French Revolution. Treading carefully, I asked her about her question on...
This year’s GCSE shambles has given algorithms a bad name. A concept whose advantages we have come to find useful when Twitter or Spotify predicts who we might like to follow or what we’d like to listen to lacked the one...
It was a dispiriting scene. Talented and hard working students on the phone begging Sixth Forms to let them in. They had 4s, they needed the 6s they got in their mocks. Aged 16 their options were narrowing. As always the...
In Melanie Phillips’ All Must Have Prizes, the Dodo represents the folly of paternalist and socialist ideas: everyone will be okay if we just say that all have achieved. But as Phillips argued, all cannot have prizes, or...
I remember the pupil well and the broken look on his face. A year 11 boy who had joined our school realised at that moment that he did not know what would come next for him. The night before his English GCSE exam he had...
Is a test or examination necessary when students leave education? The answer to that is “Yes” because it is an indication to a future employer of their employability. The reason GCSEs, O-Levels and their predecessor...
In my early days at the Department for Education, I was part of the team that led on raising the participation age. Since 2015, young people must be in some form of education until 18. That change was originally planned...
Bedales School, a co-educational boarding school in Hampshire, recognised the need to ‘rethink assessment’ 15 years ago. We were painfully aware of the shortcomings of the experience of taking 9/10 GCSEs in particular...
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