The Development of the GCSE - Essay Example

?Should GCSE format be changed over the next few years The GCSE format is in need of a shake-up. This is certainly the attitude of many Politicians today. The format, a mixture of exams and classroom assessment as well as the breadth of subjects covered and opportunity to pupils of differing abilities, has already been modified as its development has inched forward over 25 years. Not every subject is the same and the need to urgently reform one subject or one part of the format, may not be matched by a similar need in another subject. In order to address this question, the essay will briefly review the history of the GCSE and identify those features that are felt to be in need of change and can be changed. In conclusion, it will review the various proposals. There has been a vigorous debate about failures in the GCSE. Anxiety focused on Grade inflation and the suspicion that GCSE grading was faulty, but knee-jerk changes to the grade boundaries that dominated results in summer 2012 when many students failed to get predicted Grade C, led to calls to Ofqual about harsh marking1 and claims that there was a “gross injustice done to many young people”; other concerns focus on cheating or unfair practice and the range of subjects that are offered. A number of politicians today have urged that the GCSE as it stands should be replaced with more rigorous tests with better grading systems. Replacing the GCSE, however, is not so simple and current plans are already delayed until 2018. A debate about the standard secondary school exam had been ongoing in British politics since the 1950s. Efforts to modify the O level system were proposed by the then education secretary Shirley Williams in the 1970s but the election of a Conservative Government in 1979 delayed her proposals of a single comprehensive examination that would mirror comprehensive schooling. Following changes to the Scottish Ordinary Grade exam for secondary school children2 and the establishment of the Scottish Standard3, the English-based O Level and CSE4 was replaced by the broader GCSE from 1986 to 1988 under plans drawn up by Keith Joseph in 1984. However, the O level, currently still set by the University of Cambridge International Examinations board, survived in the Commonwealth, with a comparable exam also based in Hong Kong which only recently switched to the IGCSE. Current GCSEs are graded from A-G (and U) and cover around 60 subjects including a number of Vocational courses that had previously been a part of the GNVQ examinations (General National Vocational Qualifications). The exams are set to a “common timetable” between May and June each year by a number of boards, so many popular subjects are offered by a variety of competing boards like AQA, CCEA, Edexel, OCR, and WJEC. The boards are supervised by Ofqual, DCELLS (Wales) and CCEA(Ireland). Coursework was always envisaged to be a feature of the GCSE and a new body, the School Examinations and Assessment council, later the QCA, was set up in 1991 to establish and monitor what was an acceptable level of achievement. It is hard to prevent parental help, or indeed too much guidance from the teacher. The development of the GCSE is tied to the debate about selection in Education. Many countries, with the notable exception of Germany, which still retains elements of selective schooling, have moved away from routine selection. Not only was the means of selection questioned (for example an IQ test, or cognitive skills test at a specific age), but the very idea that one child should have advantages denied another child was felt to be wrong. A movement in the UK in the late 50s saw the reduction of gender segregation5, and efforts to ignore the economic background of parents. The elitist system which had existed in the UK until the early 60s allowed for a very small percentage of pupils to follow academic studies in school to the age of 18, and then to progress to Higher Education. Almost 45% of the rest achieved no qualifications6. Today, most students expect to attend University as a “Rite of passage”. Proposals to modify or abolish the present GCSE reflect some of this debate. For example, people worried about the pressures of an exam taken at 11 that would determine the future of a child’s life. Should the child succeed and enter Grammar school or High school, then an academic career that included education in a University was on offer but should a child fail at 11, then the only alternative was a Secondary Modern education and the probability of leaving school at 15 or 16. The single exam at 11 determined the future in a very real way. The modular element of GCSE together with the classroom assessment of materials for coursework were ways to reduce the pressure of a once-for-all exam. Indeed, it has been possible for much of the time the GCSE has operated, to take particular modules again and again and improve the overall score and grade. Writing to the Guardian (2012), Simon Gosden says the GCSE that “..with all its faults, opened up the possibility of attending university for so many students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”7 Modules and Coursework are open to abuse and new proposals have tended to focus again on the examination element and propose limitations to the process of continuous assessment. With the introduction of mixed-ability or Comprehensive education throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the academic distinction between the Grammar school or High School and the Secondary Modern was removed. However, the examination system had not caught up with this change. In the 1950’s a child at a Secondary Modern School was unlikely to be offered the opportunity of sitting an O level exam and might, particularly before the introduction of the CSE in 1965, well leave school with no qualifications at all Similarly, and partly because of snobbery, it was rare that a child in a Grammar school or Independent school would be offered a chance to sit a CSE, however poorly they were performing academically or however gifted they may have been in a subject the school regarded as non-academic and that was, therefore, not covered by the O level system or offered for examination to students. The new comprehensive schools, however, by selecting students capable of sitting the O level exams were forced to stream pupils into O level and CSE classes. This was a challenge to the very ethos of Comprehensive teaching and meant that many capable students who studied at schools unwilling to stream classes for O level and CSE exams, were either poorly prepared or unable to sit the O Level exam. Because the British two-tier exam system was felt to be unfair and divisive, and an increasing number of students were entered only for the CSE exams, the O Level and the CSE were effectively combined to form the present GCSE. This was a lengthy process that began with an experimental examination called the Joint 16+, but there had been other efforts to make the system fairer and easier to understand. The most important of these efforts was the conversion of numeric grades 1-5 and U into the alphabetic grades already used in CSE. The complexity of the political system, however, has meant that a number of LEAs resisted the change from selective to comprehensive education, and even today some Grammar schools continue to be part of the local State school system, for example in Kent and Lincolnshire. This meant that in certain areas, where Secondary Moderns became Comprehensive schools but the Grammar School system continued in parallel, the new Comprehensives were never teaching the full ability range as they failed to attract the brighter students. In the same way, the location of Comprehensive schools and the corresponding catchment area has meant that those schools judged by parents to be performing better have pushed up local house prices as parents have competed to buy property in the area that enables their children to qualify for places in the “better schools”. Because demand exceeds the number of places available, the property boom has provided as much a selective education as the old 11+ exam, and the more affluent rather than the more academically gifted, are the winners. This is further compounded by the rise in private tuition.8 A number of revisions of the GCSE were present from the beginning. Recognising that the O level awarded only a limited number of A grades9, the GCSE set out to remove the old O Level cap, so that any students achieving an excellent result in any subject would see this fully reflected in their final Grade. By 2007, the A*-C pass rate had increased to 63.3% with 1/5 students achieving a High Grade A. At the same time, it was clear that more students were opting for “easier” subjects and avoiding the difficult core subjects like History and Modern Languages10. At the opposite end of the Academic spectrum was the introduction of lower-tier papers which cannot be awarded any Grade higher than a C, effective selection within the GCSE exam. In 1994, Vocational courses were developed by the Government with the introduction of GNVQs, and many of these were merged in 2002 into the full GCSE system. This seems to be in line with the original intentions of Keith Joseph who planned in 1984 a comprehensive vision to measure the standard of all Secondary school pupils; he imagined that the academic part of the GCSE, effectively the old O level, would merit Grades A-C and the lower grades, allowing for two-tier papers, would be modelled on the old CSE with its element of practical training. The original plans did not consider Grades D-G to be fails in the traditional O level sense. Many of the vocational subjects have proved popular particularly with children from poorer families. At the heart of the GCSE is the desire to produce a single simple way to measure the success of all students in the UK. In 2004, Mike Tomlinson proposed a radical change in this spirit that would unite all educational results at four levels: entry, foundation, intermediate and advanced. His proposal was rejected by the Government which revised the GCSE, instead “to build on the strengths of the existing education system”. Ian Abbott, in “Education Policy” judges the rejection of the Tomlinson Report to be “a political act because the government did not want to enter the 2005 election faced with the claim… they were going to abolish GCSE examinations”11. The fact that the Government did not grasp this nettle only put off the inevitable. Both the Blair/Brown Government and the current Coalition embraced league tables as a way to monitor the health of schools and focused press attention on a system that was recognized to be in need of repair. Plans today to change the GCSE, however, include the abolition of the two-tier paper system. Mark Dawe, the chief examiner of the Oxford and Cambridge board and RSA was interviewed just after the summer exams in 2012. He told the Independent, "We're doing our students a disservice if they feel that's going to allow them to progress further."12 He pointed out that employers were “wise” to the results and only recognized Grades A-C when they were reading CVs, leaving many students with Grades of questionable value. Instead, he proposed a stop-gap exam13 that might be used by less-able students in the run-up to taking the GCSE or its equivalent. He anticipated that such an examination would not be linked to a specific age, allowing students the chance to mature academically at their own pace14. Indeed, over the period of the GCSE, programmes have been designed to help less able students deal with the academic demands of the exams. The most successful is “Study Plus”; linked to the National curriculum, and timetabled during the normal school day, it is a guided programme that specifically focuses on literacy and numeracy, accelerating the progress of students “so that they have a better chance of achieving C Grades at GCSE.”15 On the same day that Mark Dawe criticized the two-tier format, the Daily Telegraph reported that a committee headed by Sir Michael Barber, an educational advisor to Tony Blair, was looking to Hong Kong’s version of the IGCSE to plan a better qualification in English, Science and Maths. “The gold standard,” he said, “is not what happened in the 1950s in England. It is what is happening in Singapore and Hong Kong and Ontario and Alberta now. The gold standard is being set by the best education operating in the 21st century." At the heart of the concern is that the breadth of GCSE is its own problem. Less able students see their results dismissed or questioned while more academically able students do not feel fully stretched. At the same time, the possibility of retaking modules tampers with the credibility of a reliable academic snapshot. In other words, if some of the modules were taken in 2010 and others in 2011 and 2012, it is argued that it is not at all clear what the overall Grade measures except for persistence. The absolute standard which GCSE Grades were intended to show (in contrast to the percentage quota of the O level Grade) is cheapened by resits. The public see a rising rate of successful results which teachers might argue reflects better teaching methods, but, speared on by the media, the public suspects the exams are simply getting easier. There are other ways to deal with public and educational anxiety about the standards of the GCSE. Independent schools particularly have adopted a number of alternative courses, most particularly the more challenging IGCSE, (and denied for use in State schools until recently by the previous Labour administration) and the MYP16. The Middle Years’ Programme is a junior version of the International Baccalaureate combining a core of 8 subjects, interdisciplinary tasks and a personal project. The resources and training needed do not immediately commend this to the wider State school system. Because the older O level exams mostly lacked a coursework element (though this was not always the case), it was possible for mature students to sit an O level exam independently. This is very difficult to do under current GCSE guidelines and when students are no longer in full-time education. There are, however, some Open University modules available to older students as well as “equivalence tests” in Maths, English and Science which allow students to progress to Undergraduate studies even if they lack formal GCSE qualifications. These tests do not always count as formal independent qualifications outside the University where they are administered. A good example is the University of Brighton.17 UK NARIC provides help in assessing the merit of overseas’ qualifications and their comparison to existing GCSE qualifications. Less successful alternatives to the GCSE include some vocational tests like the OCR National level 2 in ICT which Ofsted has dismissed as a course of “doubtful value” despite being one of the more popular courses in English schools. The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, announced plans in the Mail on Sunday in September 2012. Focusing on the perception that the GCSE had become too easy, his key features included the abolition of coursework in favour of “a traditional ‘all or nothing’ 3-hour exam at the end of the 2-year course”,18 the abolition of partial resits and more rigorous focus 19on core subjects. In terms of organization, each exam will be organized by a single board to counter current claims that one particular subject is easier with one board rather than another. The English Baccalaureate20 or Ebacc would follow moves by schools towards teaching the more demanding IGCSEs, which retained elements of the older O level approach, and would be introduced for examination in 2018. “It was designed to encourage students to study academic subjects up to the age of 16.” Abbott records that the EBacc was designed to prevent some schools focused on their performance in league tables from “manipulating the curriculum through the introduction of vocational programmes to improve their results…” 21Indeed, a report by Alison Wolf in 2010 highlighted the move towards proper Vocational qualifications as well as the low levels of achievement in Maths and English GCSE. The report says, “in recent years, both academic and vocational education in England have been bedeviled by well-meaning attempts to pretend that everything is worth the same as everything else. Students and families all know this is nonsense.” (DfE, 2011:8)22. This statement strikes at the heart of the GCSE, an examination programme that covers the broad sweep of Secondary school education from the Academic to the Vocational. While the shortcomings of GCSEs23 are acknowledged in the creation of the EBacc, concerns are already being expressed that students who fail to score highly in the Ebaccs will be judged failures in both school and in the workplace and that those taking GCSEs in the next two or three years will equally be seen to be taking worthless exams. If the current Coalition Government is not re-elected in 2015, however, there is a possibility that a Labour Government will not follow the Ebacc plan though it is certainly likely that some modification of GCSE will still take place. It seems inevitable that the current format of GCSEs will change. The number of subjects looks set to be reduced and to be examined more rigorously, by a single written examination rather than continued assessment. An exception to this is the interest in MYP, which focuses on internal rather than external assessment. Whether the GCSE should change depends less on its original remit to be a single (comprehensive) exam to monitor secondary school achievement, and more on whether it meets the demands of the day. Today, from employers, politicians and the press, there seems to be a call for change. BIBLIOGRAPHY: James McVittie, (2008) Scottish Qualifications Authority research report 3 Edinburgh Ministry of Education report (1963a). xiii from Ministry of Education (1963a) Half Our Future, Report of the General Advisory Council for Education (England) CMND 2165 (The Newsome Report) London HMSO Crowther Committee report, (1959) 15-18, London HMSO Ian Abbott, Michael Rathbone, Phil Whitehead (eds) (2013)Educational Policy, Sage Publications London The BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19911541 accessed 10 01 13 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19355956 accessed 10 01 13 The Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2203826/Michael-Gove-New-rigorous-exams-abolish-GCSEs.html#ixzz2Hb3PjA71 accessed 10 01 13 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399671/Private-schools-dump-GCSEs-favour-old-style-O-Levels.html accessed 8 01 13 The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/9472336/Exam-boards-set-out-GCSE-shake-up-plans.html accessed 10 01 13 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/17/gcse-ebacc-michael-gove accessed 09 01 13 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/18/exam-define-failure-not-success letters accessed 09 01 13 Study plus: http://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/secondary/math/download/file/PDF/What%20is%20Study%20Plus.pdf accessed 6 01 13 Times Educational supplement: On the sykes review and the “doubtful value of OCR National level 2” http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6049767 On study skills http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6261879 Read More