Sir Michael Wilshaw, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools, is the outgoing head of Ofsted in more ways than one: his term expires at the end of the year but he remains just as eager to use his public platform, no matter who he might offend.
Indeed, anyone who gets between Wilshaw – with only six months left in post – and a camera crew will be in the most dangerous place in education. (He once memorably appeared on Homes Under the Hammer.) But unlike some who take their status as a licence to bore, Wilshaw is adept at crafting a soundbite that hits a nerve.
Wilshaw’s most recent foray saw him call for more tests for England’s secondary school pupils – to the instant dismay of the teaching unions, and probably the Department for Education – two opposing forces that Wilshaw has a rare ability to unite, if only in despair.
Coming in the middle of the GCSE summer exam season, and as some parents complain that children face too many tests at primary school, to many people Wilshaw’s proposal sounds like piling on too much pressure.
One of the headteachers’ unions, ASCL, was quick to claim that “the amount of formal testing is already onerous and the accountability system is fearsome”. Parents and some teachers on social media object to the current testing regime because of the stress they think it places on children.
But both the headteachers and Wilshaw are right. Pupils in English state schools probably already have enough external testing, although opinions differ on that. But Wilshaw also has a point: that between the standardised tests at the end of primary school – key stage two Sats – and the high-stakes exams of GCSEs five years later is a wasteland of lost opportunity.
Wilshaw noted that a high proportion of pupils with above-average results at primary school failed to go on and achieve similar results at GCSEs. There are various explanations as to why that might be, but Wilshaw’s argument is that pupils are too often left to drift in the first three years of secondary school, and the most able are not stretched.
His solution, a new test to measure progress, makes sense, if one assumes that schools would respond by giving extra resources and better teachers.
As things stand there is every incentive for schools to prioritise those taking GCSEs: they can be life-changing for schools as well as their pupils. Fall below the government’s floor standards for GCSE pass rates, and the next thing is an Ofsted inspection team at the door, with the risk of an “inadequate” rating and change of management, and even dismissal for the school’s leaders.
As a result the primacy of GCSEs has bent the school system in England out of shape. And that may have made more sense when pupils in England left school at 16, when GCSEs were the exit exam. But that has changed.
Now pupils stay on past 16, and many go on to university or further education. That has been given teeth by recent regulations impelling pupils to stay in education – or some form of training – until the age of 18. That means the exit exam no longer leads to the exit, a role that for many has been taken by A-levels at sixth form.
This makes England – and Wales and Northern Ireland – unusual in developed countries in requiring pupils to have two sets of high-stakes exams at the end of their schooling. That’s one too many.
What’s the solution? Schools are still going through a chaotic rearrangement of both GCSEs and A-levels. There’s little appetite for another wave of upheaval. But at some point the irrationality of consecutive high-stakes exams at 16 and 18 should become obvious.
An easy solution would be to abolish GCSEs in their current form, and create a new test to measure progress that could take place a year or two earlier. However, the interlocking nature of GCSEs leading on to A-levels or vocational qualifications means that unpicking one requires overhauling the other.
As the timing of GCSEs is now out of step with when pupils actually leave school, so A-levels have problems. In a time when relatively few people went on to study a narrow range of subjects at university, they made sense. Now more people stay on, and the possibilities for further study are much wider, not just in the UK but in higher education around the world.
Yet most 17- and 18-year-olds are forced to concentrate on three or four subjects. Without the weight of GCSEs before them, a three-year A-level course would allow a wider range of subjects to study, or even to offer the life skills or cultural experiences that parents demand for their children.
Instead, GCSEs and A-levels are pushed into a frantic final four years of secondary school. Changing that won’t be popular from within a system wedded to that timetable. But if an opposition party such as Labour wanted to reorient schools and finally elevate vocational qualifications to the status they enjoy in other parts of Europe, this might be the best way to do it.
And if the DfE wants to commission a report on how it could be done, Wilshaw has some time on his hands from January.
