Alternative qualifications? Four maths papers? Prescribed texts in English? The curriculum and assessment review could change the course of the GCSE resit policy.
The call for evidence left no doubt that college English and maths are in the crosshairs. Of the 44 thesis-worthy questions put to the public, 30 touched on resits due to overlaps between GCSE, 16-19 and affected subgroups. Failure to check that the questions were mutually exclusive led to significant repetition in the responses I’ve seen, ensuring nobody in DfE can possibly have time to read them.
In a frenzy, education organisations either published their full submissions or signposted existing recommendations. Don’t worry if you missed them. I’ve read them all (send help.)
Content in both GCSEs is universally declared “excessive”. Most proposals then suggest even more filler while being coy about what to cut, although I enjoyed the awarding body OCR’s honesty nominating “the more demanding content” for the chop in maths. In English, Pearson decried “excessive content” but joined others in wanting more; a return of spoken-language and broader non-literary texts.
OCR and the English Association want TV taught in English. TV? Neither the cultural capital and benefit to literacy of a novel, nor the relevance and relatability of TikTok; purely nostalgia for the days of wheeling in a TV trolley and having a quiet lesson.
The EA also claims that “the opportunities for reading contemporary and socially diverse texts have shrunk significantly,” but with no set texts in Language since 2015, blaming the GCSE is deflection. AQA soberly reports that despite a more diverse offer in their literature GCSE for schools, only 7 per cent of students were taught texts by women. I suspect the same pattern in resit English Language choices. There’s an unresolved tension between the EA’s desire for “more autonomy for teachers” and their case for a prescribed curriculum.
Almost everyone agreed on trimming the number of maths exam papers. After all, OCR’s Paper one is a highly accurate predictor of final grade. “It should be possible to change from the current three papers to two,” say MEI, before unveiling a four-paper GCSE, with different combinations of the four equating to different tiers. Poor exams officers.
Hedging bets, MEI alternately proposes “two distinct maths GCSEs”; one limited to grades one to four and the other taken by “half the cohort” (the richer half, we assume), graded five to nine. This overcomplicated proxy for tiering would create a ‘forgotten half’, unable to even aspire to a ‘strong pass’.
Then, because the scattergun was apparently still loaded, MEI suggests a third GCSE for resitters. In fact, everyone from the Royal Society to NCFE calls for off-brand resit qualifications.
English exams come under fire from all sides
The lone socially-just proposal for maths from White Rose Education suggests a “dual GCSE” of Applied and Theory as a parallel to English Language and Literature, with both taken by all students at 16. Then the single-tier, single-paper applied becomes, like Language, the resit route. The model protects parity with the non-disadvantaged students who are more likely to achieve it at 16 (avoiding a two-tier system), but allows for a slimmer curriculum, more deliverable post-16. It also facilitates those inspiring leaps across multiple grades that we see in English.
English exams come under fire from all sides. Assessed writing needs to involve “planning, drafting, and editing” (AQA), “drafting, crafting, editing” (Pearson), and “work drafted and redrafted” (EA). Aside from it being perfectly possible to demonstrate editing and drafting in exam conditions, we more urgently need to equip young people with the ability to accurately structure a sentence, or to adopt an appropriate tone, confidently and independently. I’m not sure the imagined dawdling cycle of “drafting across many iterations” (OCR) actually exists in professional writing outside of universities and the civil service. This, like wheeling in the TV, is a pull-back to booking a computer room for six weeks instead of teaching, and middle-class-favouring coursework.
Ironically, we need to look to White Rose’s model for the simplest solution for English resits. Let’s stop pretending the distinction between fiction and non-fiction justifies two papers in Language and move to a single paper. Pearson rightly calls out “undue repetition”. If English and maths post-16 required just one exam each, it would ease the delivery and exam demands on colleges.
Economically-disadvantaged students are blamelessly 19 months behind at 16, but gain ground by 19. They deserve a shot at the same exam. If the review doesn’t deliver that, it has failed.
If functional skills funding was updated to match GCSE funding, then the college where I work would most definitely run more FS courses. It is useful to bear in mind that many of our ‘resit’ students have never taken a GCSE course, because they attended SEND schools where GCSEs were never on the curriculum, or they were homeschooled, or even attended SEMH specialist ‘exclusion’ schools.
That said, for the majority or resitters will never use things like standard form, as that is very scientific, so if the GCSEs are to be changed, it isn’t just about difficulty, but also functionality.