Teachers say they are under increasing pressure to meet exam grade targets as Wales changes its GCSEs. Here are a selection of their comments from the Qualifications Wales report into early-entry GCSEs

THERE is a general lack of confidence in the systems within the exam board to provide consistent marking and results. So a lot of subject leaders – who I think have been very surprised by some of the practices they have seen in some of the marking – have thought, ‘right, I need to basically go through as many chances as we can because we are not necessarily confident with how it is at the moment’ in terms of marking and boundaries in English.”

“VERY often they put them in, you might get the C banked and that’s going to look good on your school data and then it’s about, you know, can you get those up? We have held back, because we think it’s about pupils and giving them the opportunity to get the higher grades rather than just passes.”

“YOU lose sight of individual students when you have a spreadsheet in front of you and you are trying to work out figures for how you are going to meet this A* to C target that has been set for you.”

“UNCERTAINTY and gambling and lottery, that’s how education is at the moment in secondary schools with a lot of subjects, because we don’t know. We don’t have enough information about how they are going to come out at the other end, so there has to be that early entry to give them a go.”

“I think we are in a period of flux, in the last five years or so, where exams are becoming increasingly important and schools are increasingly being forced to game the system.”

“IT’S about trying to get C grades and being able to work differently with the data. Really identifying you know, these were the Cs, these were the Ds, these are the ones we can push higher, and give them the opportunity to, you know, have a go and then do it again.”

“YOU become so obsessed with early entry stuff, as soon as a child gets that C they are taken out of that subject and put somewhere else to get a C elsewhere, because in terms of league tables, in terms of special measures, historically the C has been so important, the C has been the only measure.”

“THERE is not enough clarity and enough time for teachers to get ready and for us to prepare the children and so you have this intense pressure on everybody concerned.”

“THE heavily damaging outcome of a child entering a course and exam in November, where they haven’t covered the whole curriculum because the year of school ends in June, you are literally setting that child up to fail, because you need to know something about what question 4 is going to look like.”