What on earth do we do about Summer 2021 exams?

The mood music seems to be that exams are not going to run in the usual format next summer. The Scottish Government have cancelled their GCSE equivalent exams and are looking to replace them with some form of teacher assessment. The One Nation group of Conservatives, which constitutes around 100 MPs, have argued for GCSEs to be scrapped completely. This morning, The Guardian is reporting that there is a Plan B from the DfE for ‘rigorous’ mock exams to be sat by students using exam board specimen materials. To me, the build up of pressure is going to be such that it is inevitable that there will have to be dramatic changes to the exam process — even though I think in reality there has been little change in what we know with regards to the impact and challenges of COVID since it was initially decided that exams would run as normal in Summer 2021 earlier this year. As ever, this government reacts to political pressure rather than putting together a well thought through plan and sticking with it.

So, what are the options and the pros and cons:

OPTION 1 — The government holds its’ nerve and sticks with exams as normal

I am sure this is their preferred option. However, there are some pitfalls here. Clearly a significant number of children in Years 11 and 13 have missed chunks of teaching in this academic year, and I imagine the quality of remote learning they are doing is highly variable in quality depending on a whole range of factors. Now, there is unfairness in access to provision all the time, even in the Before Times, such as around access to private tuition, impact of long-term staff absence on some groups, class sizes, socio-economic circumstances of individual students, and so on. This situation just reveals these problems more egregiously. I think the fact that it is the potential for middle-class children to be disadvantaged is likely to be the driving force behind any changes here rather than general concern around iniquity. But it is a reasonable point — it is currently extremely difficult for schools to provide high level remote learning for self-isolators and high level in school provision concurrently, despite the government’s wishful thinking in its’ changes to legislation. Personally, this is still my preferred solution at the moment — as much as anything because I’ve not yet seen any better ideas.

OPTION 2 — Award a grade based on ‘rigorous’ Mock Exams

This is the suggested Plan B from the UK government. Some issues immediately arise here, including:

• Who is going to mark these exams? Will schools mark their own homework here, or will external markers be appointed? Many markers in schools have not been exam board trained.
• Will exam boards be required to produce a new slate of exams (which could be tricky in a short space of time, especially in subjects where licensing requirements mean papers often need to prepared months in advance) or will existing ones be used?
• Do all centres use the same papers? If so, how do we ensure that there isn’t a sharing of intelligence on different exams by students via social media, in order to protect the fairness of the process? Some specimen papers are already publicly available via exam board websites and have likely already been used? Ensuring consistency between centres is going to be a real problem here.

To me, the questions about this mean you may as well just run normal exams as there isn’t much difference between this and the Plan B.

OPTION 3 — Mess around with the timing of exams

Another option is to push exams back — which to me seems pointless as frankly COVID is not going away by next summer. What you could do is bring some exams forward and revert to some kind of modularisation in order to have some sort of externally assessed, independently verified measure. I can see how that would work in History (e.g. run a Medicine/other thematic unit exam in January as I bet all centres have taught this unit by now, maybe run another series in March, and then again in June). The concerns here will be on student mental health and the destruction of any prospect of teaching at the expense of exam prep — a totally valid concern. Year 11 is already a year where, for many students, they barely learn anything new at the expense of doing constant revision, and this systemic issue is one that needs tackling when we look past COVID.

OPTION 4 — Students received a Centre Assessed Grade on the basis of a portfolio of work, externally moderated

This is a hideous scenario to me that will just be a nightmare for teacher workload, especially if it has to happen for both GCSE and A-level, and I think would also be extremely stressful for students. People who are pro-coursework seem to have forgotten the stress for students of submitting 15 different drafts of a coursework piece in order to claw every possible mark available. The impact on the quality of teaching for all other year groups would be severely compromised by such a measure. The scope for malpractice would widen in this eventuality. The arguments that these kind of systems which rely heavily on coursework disproportionately benefit the advantaged over the disadvantaged and are subject to biases are also well-known by this point as well. To me this is a really bad idea for most subjects (I can see an argument in subjects like Art and Drama which are already heavily weighted towards coursework but I’m not expert enough to get into that fully).

OPTION 5 — Change the grading structure to focus on enabling access to the next step in a student’s career journey

This seems quite logical. A lot of the problems have come from trying to pretend that the grades students received in 2020 were exactly the same as the grades received in 2019. That’s clearly not the case, whether or not the algorithm was used. Indeed, given that we can’t pretend that, I’m not sure we should even bother to try. Perhaps we need to look at a much simpler set of awards that focus on whether a student has demonstrated the skills to progress to the next step. Universities, Sixth Forms and apprenticeship providers should probably be tasked with looking at ways they can secure, if possible in a fair way, additional information about student capabilities to help them make admissions decisions.

To put it bluntly, there are no good solutions, and any option you try is going to have issues of consistency and fairness. The current exam system also has these, but probably in a less pronounced way than other systems. Underpinning a lot of the problems are the nature of school accountability and competitiveness, that discourage schools working together on these issues to solve such complicated problems. Fundamentally, lots of schools do not trust each other — and frankly with good reasons at times. Scrapping 2021 league tables would be a good beginning point here. I think whatever system you come up with has to have some external assessment component in order to protect teachers and institutions more broadly from excessive parental and student pressure.

There are also bigger questions about the status of the current GCSE system in particular, and whether these high-stakes exams are fit for purpose in a world where, theoretically, all young people stay in Education or Training until 18. I’m not sure in the middle of this year is the time to make a hasty decision about this but I do think it’s a valid conversation to be having. That’s not to say exams themselves are bad and should go (they absolutely are not and they should play an important role in any future system, in my view), but the structure of the system more broadly probably needs looking at again, particularly if COVID is not going anywhere anytime soon.