A teenager enters a karate dojo for the first time and is instructed to fight an older, experienced student.
“I haven’t had any training yet,” he says to the unsympathetic sensei. Within minutes, he quits.
This scene from ‘Cobra Kai’, the ‘Karate Kid’ spin-off show, is a great analogy for some bad education practices, from initial college assessments to premature introduction of nineteenth-century texts in GCSE English resit courses.
It’s in clever contrast with Mr Miyagi’s “wax on, wax off” approach from the 1984 movie, which laid the foundations for success in the high-stakes competition finale. Teaching the fundamentals properly can look very different to how something is terminally assessed.
Awarding body OCR’s chief executive, Jill Duffy, recently told the education select committee that cutting the number of GCSE exam papers “could have a positive impact”. I completely agree. Reducing the number of English and maths GCSE papers would make resits more deliverable and is a pragmatic way to prevent a prejudicial two-tier system.
However, Duffy has also been advocating an unnecessary increase in prescribed content in GCSE English Language, in tension with reducing assessment. She’s never actually been a teacher, so it’s odd for her to get so involved in subject-level detail.
When she asked in a recent social media post how GCSE English should be made “more relevant, engaging, and joyful for students and teachers,” I initially assumed she was talking about classroom practice. But no. She wants to tinker with the qualification, as though engagement and joy are found in the pages of an exam specification.
It’s about as credible as me monologuing about how “we” should improve our standing in international karate and concluding that the problem is the colour of the mats.
Days before telling MPs there should be reduced assessment, Duffy publicly described the English Language GCSE as “too narrow”, bemoaning the lack of opportunity to analyse “modern forms of writing, pieces of multimedia or famous speeches.”
With no set texts and a wide emphasis on writing skills in the current GCSE, it is already necessary to engage learners with those things to teach English well. Great resit teachers artfully synthesize gritty teen fiction, song lyrics or movie clips with development of the skills the GCSE will ultimately test. The best lessons I’ve seen were almost always built around source material I would never imagine showing up in the exam. After all, Daniel LaRusso didn’t have to wax a car in the All-Valley Karate Tournament.
Embarrassingly for Duffy though, writing a speech absolutely can come up in the GCSE exam (page 7 of her own organisation’s specification) and the obvious way to teach any form of writing is to begin by analysing and internalising exemplars. God knows how Duffy imagines it’s done. Presumably, “Today’s lesson is writing speeches. Off you go.”
“I haven’t had any training yet,” might be the response.
Behind all this is the belief that things don’t get taught if they’re not in the exam. And that’s somewhat true, especially in GCSE resits where it’s hard to take a “wax on, wax off” approach if you’re not given enough classroom time, and when everybody wilfully ignores that the performance measure is about progress over three years, not attainment in the first possible exam sitting.
Changing the qualification isn’t going to improve curriculum design, or teaching, or shake off the obsession with short-term attainment over progress. Still, if you’re the Eagle Fang dojo of awarding organisations, lagging behind Cobra Kai’s and Miyagi-Do’s greater market share, then hitting ‘reset’ might just give you a chance to increase your revenue.
We need to curtail well-resourced but inexpert vested interests being given excessive air time. Most of the awarding bodies have been throwing money (public funding diverted from classrooms to their inflation-busting exam fees) at chasing daft headlines [Like AQA looking at ‘duolingo style test for GCSE resitters], even dafter headlines [about AQA using AI cameras to invigilate GCSEs], and convening roundtables for the sake of alliteration over principle. What students, teachers, and parents would much prefer them to focus on is hiring credible examiners, marking accurately and delivering results on time.
Excessive talk of assessment draws energy away from the craft of teaching, which is what truly brings engagement and joy to a classroom. In the words of Mr Miyagi, “if karate used to defend plastic metal trophy, karate no mean nothing.”
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