New GCSES to expose too much exam help

GCSES this year will expose the schools that unfairly helped children get better results, the chairman of the Independent Schools Council (ISC) has said. Barnaby Lenon, the former Harrow headmaster, said that certain schools will suffer “disproportionately” due to the reformed GCSES. He explained that some schools rely heavily on coursework to boost grades, with teachers offering extra help to low-ability pupils who may not perform so well in the final exams.

GCSES this year will expose the schools that unfairly helped children get better results, the chairman of the Independent Schools Council (ISC) has said.

Barnaby Lenon, a former headmaster at Harrow School, said that certain schools will suffer “disproportionately” due to the reformed GCSES.

He explained that some schools rely heavily on coursework to boost grades, with teachers offering extra help to low-ability pupils who may not fare so well in the final exams.

But in many of the new “tougher” GCSES – including maths, English, history and geography – coursework has been axed altogether.

“Schools with a number of weaker pupils, who relied more heavily on coursework in the past, may find their results plummeting,” Mr Lenon told The Daily Telegraph.

“Now, the fact is that many pupils get their best mark in their teacherassessed coursework. Where a school has a significant number of more marginal pupils who historically got over the pass/fail boundary as a result of their high coursework marks, clearly those are the schools who might suffer from these reforms.”

Ofqual, the exams watchdog, uses a system called “comparable outcomes” to alter grade boundaries in order to ensure that this year’s cohort will not be disadvantaged for being the “guinea pigs” of GCSE reforms. “What they mean is across the country as a whole the grade distribution will be similar to last year,” Mr Lenon said. “That won’t be the same for individual schools. Some will do better and some worse.”

He said one reason for a school doing better is down to teacher being better prepared to teach the new courses. Meanwhile, some schools may achieve worse results due to coursework being “stripped out” of many core subjects.

“If you were a school that relied heavily on very good coursework – and they may well be coursework marks that they deserved, [students] may be well trained and earned those marks – that will no longer be available to them,” Mr Lenon said. “There was the potential for unfairness. Some teachers could be giving more help [with coursework] than others.” His comments come as hundreds of thousands of students around the country prepare to receive their GCSE results this Thursday.

Many will be the first cohort to take the new GCSES, which were reformed by former education secretary Michael Gove, as part an attempt to inject rigour into the qualifications and bring the UK in line with top performing countries in the Far East. Of the 5.1 million exams that were taken this summer, 90 per cent were in the new reformed subjects which use a numerical grading system of 9 to 1 instead of A* to G. Many of the reformed GCSES have had their coursework element vastly reduced or axed altogether. Coursework – or “non examined assessment” – used to make up 40 per cent English literature and English language but now it has been reduced to zero.

An Ofqual spokesman said that coursework was “constraining teaching” in many subjects and failed to adequately discriminate between students’ abilities. “We designed the assessment of reformed qualifications to address these shortcomings, as well as reflect the balance and nature of the new subject content,” he said.