Call to look at school graduation certificate instead of exams
Scotland should consider implementing a school graduation certificate in place of the traditional exams system, the organisation behind a sweeping report into Scotland’s education system has said.
Beatriz Pont, co-author of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report into the function of the Curriculum for Excellence (CFE), said one solutiontosolvingproblemsidentified around the “senior phase” of schools would be to create a certificate system akin to the baccalaureate.
Speaking at a conference yesterday, Ms Pont said there were a number of options published inarecentoecdworkingpaper that would allow the education systemtomovebeyondthe“legacy system” of student assessment in Scotland.
Also addressing the conference, Rod Grant, headmaster of the independent Clifton Hall School in Edinburgh, also warned major changes were needed to Scotland's assessment system.
He warned children joining his school at secondary level did not have the skills they had five years ago.
Mr Grant said: “Too many pupils at age 16 and 15 have to takesubjectsthatwedon'tactuallywantto.whatdoesthatlead to? It leads to a lack of engagement and that’s not good for teaching and learning.”
He added: “We should focus more on teaching and learning and critical thinking and less on high-stakes single measurements, where children are regurgitating learning material. We need to focus more on
personalised learning. I'm continually asking students what theylikeandwhattheydon’tlike about school and we act upon that. We need to do that nationally.”
Ms Pont said the OECD had published a working paper that looked at how the forms of assessment could be broadened out.
The authors of the main report, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence Into the Future, published in June, recommended
scrapping the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and reforming Education Scotland. The exams body is to be broken up and replaced, with pupils, parents and teachers to be consulted on changes, while responsibilityforschoolinspections will be split off to a new independent system. Ms Pont said: “[What] this paper proposes is to explore the replacement of exams at age 16 by a school graduation certificate, and then to consider options in
terms of the upper secondary assessment system to develop a mixed method of assessment where it's more resilient."
She said alternatives would prevent what happened during the pandemic; to seek better alignment of assessment CFE by broadening the forms of assessment, reconfigure the role of school-based assessment and develop the goal of vocational qualifications in broadening the curriculum. Ms Pont said:
"I don't think that it's a matter of dropping [exams], but maybe reducing the weight that they have in the overall assessment of a child or a student who leaves school – where you can gauge their creativity and other types of schemes that are not necessarily only pen and paper tests of how they are able to repeat the knowledge that they learned.”