Commenting on today (Thursday)'s GCSE
and level 2 Applied General Qualification results,
Dr Mary Bousted, Joint General
Secretary of the National Education
Union,
said:
"Today's results are a testament to
the hard work of students over a highly disrupted couple of
years. The support of parents and the commitment of
schools to their students, should also be
praised.
“Students and parents deserve better
of a government that was so unwilling to heed the advice of
unions who early on identified the pitfalls within its Covid
strategy on exams. As with A-Levels last week, NEU members
believe that ministers were slow to recognise the support that
was needed by schools and colleges through the effects of the
pandemic. The disruption to face-to-face teaching time was often
significant, and simply providing revision lists for exams did
not take sufficient account of
this.
“In the few, but not enough, subjects,
where topic optionality was introduced, NEU members reported that
the mitigation was on the whole useful and helped prioritise
teaching and learning. As the NEU wrote in response to the
proposals at the time, this measure should have been extended to
a larger number of
subjects.
"It is totally unjustifiable that the
government intends to use today's results to rank schools in
league tables. Even in a normal year league tables provide only a
distorted picture of a school's performance, and after two
years of Covid their publication is grotesquely unfair. The
decision not to publish tables for primary schools due to
pandemic disruption should also have applied to secondaries. The
government's failure to do so indicates how little it has learned
from the pandemic. To knowingly publish flawed data, even with
caveats, will cause great stress amongst teachers and
leaders and has the potential to mislead the public. The
government must come to its senses on this issue and not publish
these tables.
"All of the issues coming to the
surface today are caused by a broken system. Testing all
16-year-olds, almost exclusively via exam, is a relic of a time
when education or training were not, like now, compulsory until
the age of 18. England’s assessment system is backward-looking
and not fit for purpose. Assessment must provide a more rounded
picture of every student – in order to do justice to everything
of which they are capable, but also to better set them up for
life and work in the 21st century.
“From an administrative perspective,
there are clear structural issues which seed problems down the
line. The exams system is now overloaded such that the exam
boards are struggling. The non-payment to exam markers has caused
great frustration. The delays to the release of some AGQs last
week was unacceptable, and we hope that there won’t be a repeat
with AGQs this week.
"Covid has exposed the current
high-stakes regime as both vulnerable and misguided. NEU members
have joined with parents, students, academics, employers and
policy makers from across the political spectrum via the
Independent Assessment Commission, to call for the modernisation
and improvement of assessment and qualifications in England. A
system based entirely on exams should be consigned to history,
and there is a broad consensus for
change.
