Teach Secondary Issue 14.3

Too much, TOO SOON? When even exam boards are sounding the alarm over the scale and volume of GCSE assessments, it might be time to try a different approach, reasons Amy Sayer ... T he majority of students in England currently sit the equivalent of 31.5 hours of exams over an intense period of a couple of months in their final year of secondary school. In late 2024, this prompted one of main exam boards, OCR, to announce that they wanted to see a “ Rebalancing of assessment away from a sole reliance on exams at 16. ” As the learning gap between disadvantaged students and their non- disadvantaged peers continues to grow – despite many schools now offering a range of interventions to specifically address that – we must surely consider whether the current system of KS4 assessment is sufficiently inclusive or appropriate for preparing students for the modern world. Restoring ‘integrity’ Personally, I’mnot aware of many jobs today where employees are put under intense pressure to recall and summarise years of work, all on one specific date. So why are we still asking teenagers to do precisely that, at the ages of 15 and 16, at a time when their brains are still developing? When I first began teaching in 2007, there were multiple GCSE subjects that included a coursework component as part of their final grade, with teachers used to marking and moderating as a wider team to ensure consistency and fairness. By 2015, however, the then Conservative government opted to remove coursework components from the vast majority of non-creative subjects, arguing that this would restore ‘integrity’ to the GCSE results, and stretch students more. My own experience of supporting students in completing their coursework was that the earlier arrangement often resulted inmuch less anxiety for students, allowing them to enter the exam room knowing that they had already achieved part of their grade. It also gave students from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance to receive extra support when they needed it. Indeed, I often found that many were happy to attend after-school coursework catch-up sessions, where they could study in a safe, supportive and warm environment. Students during this period were able to experience success in real time, which in turn boosted their self-esteem and confidence in the run-up to their exams – in stark contrast from the delayed gratification and long wait for exam results that they experience today. Collective effort At one time, many students would deliberately choose subjects with coursework components because they knew that the anxiety involved in taking purely exam-based subjects would put them at a psychological disadvantage and potentially cause them to underperform. Coursework also allowed students to type their work, and utilise more processing time between questions – whichmade achieving a good grade muchmore accessible for students with disabilities and learning needs. As many readers will recall, the 2021-2022 exam season saw teachers put in the position of having to give their students teacher- assessed grades (TAGs), owing to the repeat lockdowns prompted by the pandemic. Teachers had to unite as professionals, in a collective effort to mark and moderate work, hold extra intervention sessions for students and generally ensure that a rigorous process was in place to ensure that students were allocated the grades they deserved. Inmy experience, this led to a much fairer set of results for the vast majority of my students. Yet things quickly returned to ‘normal’, with a rapid restoration of pre-pandemic exam arrangements. Now, students who had missed large amounts of their education during lockdown periods – often due to circumstances entirely beyond their control – were expected to sit a large number of exams with no amendments, almost as if the pandemic had never happened and left no practical or emotional impacts. Urgent questions The scheduling of GCSE exams in summer months continues to be intense, withmany students likely to encounter at least one day – or evenmultiple days – containing two long examinations. Schools therefore try tomitigate against the psychological and physical pressure of this intensity by holding mock exams (or ‘pre-public exams’), usually at or near the end of the first year of students’ GCSE courses. This lets students experience what it’s like to actually sit in an examhall and, depending on the subject, write in longhand for sustained periods. Yet what often happens is that many students end up feeling overwhelmed, having recognised that this form of assessment isn’t accessible to them and how their brains work. “I’mnot aware ofmany jobs where employees are under intense pressure to recall and summarise years ofworkon one specificdate” 28 teachwire.net/secondary