Reflections on GCSE Results Day

Last Thursday was my first GCSE results day. This feels rather bizarre 3 years into teaching across 2 different schools with various different roles under my belt but there it is. The picture across the country is broadly what everyone expected, results are down on the whole from last year but up significantly since 2019. Not a big suprise considering these are the first "proper" exams since the pandemic but with students suplied with advanced information. My academy feels reasonably happy on the day, obviously not all subjects have done as well as others and no one has been unable to unseat our superb English department which for years has dominated with high quality teaching and very strong grades. The maths team, of which I am a part, is very happy. These are our best results ever and our average grade actually did not go down from 2021, and in other measures we improved. I teach a top set and am delighted that some students who were not predicted 9s have got them and that we have some real success stories of students who decided their predicted grades were not good enough and smashed them. There are of course many students who are dissappointed that they couldn't quite get over the line and there were a few students who worked increadibly hard, but didn't quite make it who I feel very sorry for.

                                                   GCSE  Results day 2022 at my school

There is one student who particularly makes me think. They were predicted an 8 in maths but have worked really hard all year and managed to get a 9 making them one of the top students in the school. I have loved working with them for the last 2 years and am so proud of how they have done but would have been whatever grade they achieved becuase they were always so friendly, collobaritive and studious in class. When I see they have a 9 I go into full salesman mode for not only maths but further maths A level. I am actually not that bothered which school or college they attend to do it (even though I would obviously prefer them to stay) but I really want them to continue to be in a maths classroom and think they will really enjoy the subject. The student is a girl and we need to be doing a lot more to encourage more girls to take up further maths where the gender gap is often higher. The student tells me that they really don't want to do further maths even though they got the 9 because they don't enjoy it enough.

Of course students should choose the subjects they enjoy for A level but it really upset me because further maths should be a subject that they would love. They are creative, highly methodical and very good at problem solving and they would have done extremely well and from my experience of teaching them they would have really enjoyed it. However, while we had done a very good job of preparing these students for GCSEs that was part of the problem. Students, particularly in year 11 are not being taught to love maths or to see the deeply creative elements of it that are explored in further maths, instead we are desperately trying to get them to get the grade they need at GCSE. Particularly following mocks in January lessons become all about revising old material, practicing exam papers and exam technique to pick up the most marks. For me that's not teaching maths, that's teaching an exam. 

I remember this as part of my own experience at school across all subjects, desperately shaping my brain around a set of parameters that are not repeated in any other moment in our lives. I would re read my copy of the Odyssey and my book of greek tragedy for my classical civilisations GCSE paper so much that the copies fell apart. This was because detailed knowledge of the texts was essential if you wanted to achieve the top grades despite the fact that no classacist or academic has ever had to write a paper or manuscirpt without text readily at hand. Some would suggest that GCSEs like this need an overhall with texts provided in the same way that a calculator is provided for maths. They would say we need to change the way we examine and what we are examining. I would have I think done well in these systems and got an equally good grade as I was always strong in humanities particularly classics.

However, this would still require all the tricks of the trade in preparing for an exam, they would just be different tricks. Forcing students to go through all these hoops to get the grade they need diverts their study for months if not years away from actually studying the subject and towards studying for an exam and this can really turn students off the subject. I think this was the case with the afformentioned student, they had put so much effort and time into revising for their maths exam that they stopped actually enjoying studying maths and explorng the areas of maths they found most interesting. Everything superfluous to the exam falls to the wayside it's all about the result. My own example of this is with languages. When I was young I loved learning french (though I was never very good at learning irregular verbs) and loved Spanish even more (far fewer irregulars). But as year by year we got closer to the exam I fell out of love with the subjects and by year 11 there was no chance of me taking either for A level. I'd found the experience of learning the language reduced to vocab, verb tables and working out how to get the most marks on a speaking or writing paper even when you weren't really sure how to hold a conversation or write more than a few sentances in the language. I have never gone back to either despite my A in french and A* in Spanish and don't intend to, with my skills in both virtually non-existent. GCSEs have the power to really turn students off the subjects they study, by forcing them into these constraints.

More than this to put a student through the process of revising for 8, 9 or 10 subjects is a hideously tough ordeal, you have so many different bits of content to remember and different exam techniques to learn. You have to remember the different points to cover to get full marks in a 5 mark biology question on cells as well as the buzzwords ("width" and "depth")  that history papers need you to use in practically every sentance to make sure you get the marks, even though you'd be hard pressed to find a historian who uses these words in this way (and which totally confused me when I read one of my younger sister's essays last year). Not only all this but you're going through one of the toughest periods of your life with various dramas exploding around you and you are still very much a child. While you go through this period you are told by your teahcers and relatives that these exams are the most important thing you've ever done and that your life is ruined if you screw them up. 

So we have a system that pushes young people to deep anxiety and often depression, which sometimes allows them to fall out of love with the subjects they are studying and which is in many ways a farse with students learning how to pass an exam rather than how to become better in their subject. The question is why?

GCSE's date from a time where most young people left school at 16 and went to work, they needed some sort of qualifications to help them get a job and to help employers differentiate. Well that world no longer exists with young people legally obliged to stay in education till 18. Some people say that we need to show that people have basic english and maths and it is a requirement for many jobs to have a pass mark in both. Well then why not just have a proficiency test either at 16 which is much more basic and less time consuming, or have a proficiency test which people can take when applying for jobs. In  fact we have this anyway! When I was becoming a teacher I was required to go to a test centre and take a numeracy and literacy test - my GCSEs, A levels and university degrees were apparently not proof enough. And lets be honest, while it is important for people to have good numeracy and literacy skills for most jobs, their knowledge of pythagoras and 'an inspector calls' is hardly relevent (and to be even more honest they will probably have forgotten it anyway).

Many people are very closed minded about it, saying "well how would we do college admissions?" or "how else could it work?". Well my answer to this is that they manage absolutely fine in the rest of the world. While some countries in Europe do test at 16 rarely are they anywhere near as rigerous as GCSEs and many countries do not examine at all. This is also true of countries with the best education systems in the world like Finland. There are in fact dozens of different ways to run an education system that does not include so many formal eams at 16, I won't say they're all perfect and of course every system has its disadvantages but to say that there is no other way is blinkered. We could have a system where more subject are taken to 6th form, like the French do, or a system where students chose their subjects much earlier- like in Denmark. With the issues of colleges I would also point to Denmark where students decide the type of courses they want to take and this does not negatively impact their outcomes (Skov 1986). This post is not really here to give a verdict on exactly what we should do but to show that what we currently do is woefully inappropriate and that there are other options. 

Whatever system we choose, getting rid of GCSEs would allow us to teach more skills and less content so that instead of having students who know a lot of content when they're 16 and then forget it the next year we have students who develop good mathematical/analytical/agument skills. Students who can better use their education to help them in whatever life they choose to lead. We could teach students that the reason they should listen to us and learn what we are teaching, is because it is interesting and because of the skills they will learn rather than because they need it for their GCSEs (a phrase you even hear in year 7 lessons). These students would learn the intrinsic value of knowledge and learning rather than the idea that learning is an arduous and unenjoyable process designed purely to get you a grade. I am not saying we do away with all formal assessments but can't we delay that process at least until the students actually chose to leave education?

You only have to ask students in year 10 and 11 and they will all tell you how much they hate GCSEs, they will always ask me why we have to do them and I tell them that when I become education secretary they will be the first thing on the chopping block. I have spoken to many people who seem to think that because they had to suffer through GCSEs then so should other people, almost as if they would rather everyone suffered because they had to. We need to open our eyes to the experiences that students have with these exams, how they prevent them from enjoying learning - which ultimately prevents them from learning, to how students have to deal with immense stress when they are so young and still discovering who they are and then think what is the point of all this. Quite frankly what we have at the moment is outdated and is actually determinetal to the education of our students, more and more teachers I talk to are of the same opinion. Sadly this is not something that any of the major political parties espouses and as long as education is used as a political football it is unlikely this will change.

Well done to everyone on their results, I'm sorry that it was so awful to get them and I'm sorry that we subjected you to it at all.