How to cope with the new GCSES
With children facing the toughest exams in a generation, Judith Woods feels under siege
Door slamming. Arguments. Tears and tantrums. Despair and dejection. And that’s just the parents. Yes, it’s almost GCSE time, folks, when homes across the land, especially mine, are mired in misery. It’s a well-worn tradition, like Lent, but with shouting and Dairy Milk. But parents like me are feeling worse than ever, having lived through the mocks and heard the terrible accounts of being paralysed in exam halls like deer in headlights.
But this is far from being the sameold, same-old story of exam hell. This year is very different. Why? Because these GCSES will be the hardest exams Britain’s children have faced in a generation and our young people are, I fear, being set up to fail.
“We started getting a lot of distraught parents on the phone,” says Caroline Stanton of crammer experts Justin Craig, which provides day and residential courses for around 5,000 GCSE and A-level students every year. “They were calling us because their children were so confused by mock exams, which are a lot more challenging.”
Last year, new, harder English and maths exams were introduced, along with a number grading system instead of letters. Tests were promptly dubbed “Big Fat GCSES” because they dramatically raised the academic bar. Those pupils were the proverbial canaries in Gove’s curricular coal mine and just about survived.
But this year’s cohort will be the first facing a full complement of ultrarigorous exams. Stanton says: “A lot of subjects previously had substantial coursework; that’s all gone now in most cases. It’s just exams, and the fact grades are now numbered has increased the confusion.”
Results are presented numerically, from nine down to one. Thus, a three is a D or low C and a four is a C. A five equates to a low B and a six to a high B. Grade seven is an A and anything above equates to an A*. This is in order to differentiate between candidates at the higher end of the scale – even absolutely outstanding candidates are unlikely to achieve a straight run of nines.
But new exams are harder because the curriculum is crammed with more content aimed to stretch our children after a long period of grade inflation. “The Blair government decided to hold schools and local authorities to account for pupils’ performance,” says Prof Alan Smithers, head of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham. “The pressure was passed on to exam boards, so papers got easier.”
As a parent, I have no problem with injecting more rigour into education. High standards are an admirable goal. But having glanced at the punitively difficult mock physics and chemistry exams, they bear a far greater similarity to my science A-levels than my O-levels.
And because the exams are now harder, the exam board regulator Ofqual has decreed that grades will be based on comparative outcomes. This means that broadly the same proportion of children will receive a C or a B or an A as before – even if it means lowering the grade boundaries needed to achieve each level.
Last year, the new maths GCSE was so tough candidates achieved a four, which is an old grade C, with just 18 per cent of the overall mark. In what parallel world does that make any sense? By comparison, a grade nine required pupils to achieve 79 per cent and above.
That’s fine if you’ve hit the mathematically gifted jackpot, but it feels egregiously unfair to expect averagely intelligent children to toil away at an exam that is geared towards the top few per cent.
What’s truly frightening, from the perspective of a parent like me, is that GCSE results have never been more important. Universities casting their eye over candidates used to look at the results from AS exams taken in the first year of A-level. These have been axed, however, so in future universities will only have GCSES to go by when making offers to sixth formers.
It will take at least a couple of years for this new system to settle down and, as a parent, I feel for now all I can do is cross my fingers and hope for the best.