Let’s not return to flawed exams. We have better ways to assess our children

The pandemic has given us a perfect opportunity to reset the education system

August 15, 2021

This piece was first published in The Guardian

After a week of GCSE and A-level results, we are in danger of missing the big point – our assessment system is not fit for purpose. It ruins the last four years of school on a narrow, stressful, unfair and badly designed exam merry-go-round. So, before we revert to flawed pre-Covid exams, now is the time for radical change.

The results of teacher assessments, we are told, is “grade inflation” but perhaps they actually reflect grade reality – the reality of what a child has learned in that subject over time, rather than merely what they can recall in that highly pressured moment in an exam hall.

Simon Lebus, head of Ofqual, the exams watchdog, is right when he says: “Exams are a bit like a snapshot, a photograph – you capture an instant, it’s a form of sampling – whereas teacher assessment allows teachers to observe student performance over a much longer period, in a rather more complex way, taking into account lots of different pieces of work and arriving at a holistic judgment. We can feel satisfied that it’s likely to give a much more accurate and substantial reflection of what their students are capable of achieving.”

This is particularly true for the most disadvantaged students. The received wisdom is that exams are fairer and more impartial. Leave aside that Ofqual admits that one in four grades is wrongly marked, the evidence from our schools suggests that students living in poverty are most adversely affected by having to perform in high-stakes moments in the exam hall. And many people are not aware that in a normal exam year a third of students, often branded “the forgotten third”, must fail their exams, however well they do, because of where grade boundaries are placed. In other countries, such as the US, if you meet the criteria, you pass.

Of course, without training and internal and external moderation to get rid of biases and inaccuracies, teacher-assessed grades can have problems, but this has been overcome for years in subjects such as drama, music and art and the extended project qualification (EPQ), which is much respected by universities.

I understand the impulse of some teachers, scarred by the huge amounts of extra work and pressure piled on them this year, to want to return to external exams. But that would be a huge missed opportunity. Many teachers have benefited from powerful professional development on curriculum and assessment in the past two years and we should harness these skills to shape a new system.

To succeed, we need to win the argument about “rigour’ in education. In the hands of former education secretary Michael Gove, rigour became the term for harder exams; harder exams were taken to mean more subject content. Yet this isn’t rigour. Rigour should mean that the assessment system is a true reflection of the varied strengths of every child – their knowledge, skills and dispositions. A rigorous assessment system would go beyond surface knowledge and exam technique and value the ability to think, to understand, to apply knowledge. It would identify the wider dispositions and strengths of every child. It would capture the development of each child throughout their schooling, not just on a few days, so that we get rid, once and for all, of the cliff-edge moment of the unveiling of 10 numbers or letters on GCSE day.

To do this, we need to change both what we assess and how we assess it (this needs to be varied – not just all the eggs in the exam basket). Ways to achieve this would include the following three:

First, students should be able to study interdisciplinary courses, not just single subject courses. So, a Steam (science, technology, engineering, arts and maths) GCSE, not just separate maths and sciences. Some independent and state schools are now devising their own courses on global perspectives, migration and climate change.

Second, we should recognise the strengths of every child in dispositions that are key to thriving in the modern world – creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication (or oracy). Employers spend a huge amount of time assessing these when they recruit, many believing they are now a better indicator of high performance than a degree.

Third, we could have many modes of assessment – not just exams and teacher assessment but other methods now widely used, for example, in universities. If you are studying medicine at a Russell Group university, you are assessed not just by exams but through observations, structured discussions, vivas, portfolios of evidence. And universities have experimented with open book exams and exams with extended periods of time, both of which have been successful. Assessments could be taken in secondary schools over several years, when the student is ready, rather than in one big group at the same time.

Across the world, there are interesting assessment practices we can learn from. Many of these practices have a similar purpose – to broaden what is valued in school beyond a narrow set of exams. (This paper is a great curation from Bill Lucas of some of the key ones: rethinkingassessment.com/our-findings/). The Mastery Transcript Consortium in America gives a more holistic dashboard of a student’s achievements. The Australian Council for Educational Research has worked successfully with schools on how to offer evidence of dispositions such as creativity and critical thinking.

This autumn, Rethinking Assessment (a coalition of schools, employers, universities, teachers and parents) will be conducting research projects in classrooms across the country in each of these three areas and we are seeking more schools to take part.

The aim is to capture the evidence and start to design a more “comprehensive learning record”, a digital transcript of the full strengths and achievements of every child. This passport could be tailored by the student to meet the needs of employers, universities and colleges and would mean that young people leave school with something that genuinely reflects what they can do and who they are.

This would be an assessment reform that would need to be implemented over time with proper training and support for teachers. It is one that we believe would command widespread support, be a lot fairer, would motivate young people and prepare them properly for the future.

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