Exams

Major exam reform the ‘last thing schools need’, warns ex-DfE adviser

'Incremental improvement' model would help 'resource-starved' schools, Sam Freedman says

'Incremental improvement' model would help 'resource-starved' schools, Sam Freedman says

Sam Freedman

Ministers should team up with exams regulator Ofqual and a commission of experts to create a 10-year plan for improving assessment, a former government adviser has said. 

Sam Freedman, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and ex-Department for Education adviser, warned the incoming prime minister that major GCSEs and A-level reforms are the “last thing schools need” at present. 

In a new report published today, Freedman recommended a new model where the Department for Education, Ofqual and assessment experts pull together a strategy designed to improve secondary assessment over the course of a decade or even longer. 

It follows calls from various high-profile groups and commissions for wholesale changes to assessment, with recommendations including the scrapping of GCSEs.

It also comes amid chaos with BTEC and other technical qualification results in the first exam year since the pandemic began. 

Conservative leadership hopeful Rishi Sunak recently pledged to introduce a British baccalaureate that would require all pupils to study English and maths beyond the age of 16.

And today The Tony Blair Institute proposed that GCSEs and A-levels should be scrapped and replaced with continuous assessments. 

But Freedman said the “incremental improvement” model would be appreciated by “time and resource-starved schools”, as proposals for overhauling the system “typically exaggerate the benefits while failing to acknowledge the costs”.

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Rishi Sunak

“Education systems are interconnected and changing one major component dramatically can cause upheaval elsewhere,” he said.

“Moreover, the last thing schools need as they deal with the after-effects of the pandemic and ever tighter funding is another assessment revolution.”

‘Comparative judgment’ could broaden assessment

Freedman said the new model could identify genuine issues with the current systems and opportunities for improvement without “overhauling” the education system. 

But if it was felt that “more substantial” reform was justified, the review should set out all the areas of the education system changes would affect and ensure mitigations were in place. 

For example, if ministers decided it was important to broaden the type of assessment used, they could look at “comparative judgment”, where lots of markers compare two papers side by side and rank them.

This could help avoid risking a “reduction in reliability”, Freedman said.

“Done enough times this produces a rank order that can be turned into grades that evidence suggests are more accurate than traditional marking for these types of questions.”

A-levels have been criticised for being too narrow. But if ministers wanted to “encourage greater breadth”, they could introduce a mandatory maths qualification for those students not taking STEM subjects, or humanities for those only doing STEM. 

The Tony Blair Institute’s proposal is for a new qualification involving “multiple, rigorous forms of continuous assessments” throughout sixth form. A series of low-stakes assessments for pupils at 16 would be retained, the think tank said. 

Commenting on the TBI proposals, Geoff Barton, general secretary of school leaders’ union ASCL, said it “increasingly seems that it is only the government which thinks that there is no need for reform despite the fact that at the current rate of progress the attainment gap between disadvantaged and other children will never close”.

Exam system under pressure

It comes as the exam boards all faced issues on results day, after returning to in-person summer exams after two years of issuing teacher grades. 

As of yesterday, some students were still awaiting their BTEC results. Pearson said it was a “tiny” proportion of students who took the qualifications, but repeatedly refused to provide actual figures, and denied it was a “systemic” issue.

They claimed university places should not be at risk, but students feared accommodation would fill up, or they would be left without suitable places via clearing.

Cambridge Technicals, run by exam board OCR, were also delayed in awarding some grades. 

Labour’s shadow skills minister Toby Perkins said exam boars needed to be “honest and open about what is going on”.

Meanwhile, teachers faced issues accessing AQA’s results portal to see how their cohorts performed. 

Ofqual and DfE were contacted for comment.

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