Statement on GCSE results
Commenting on the GCSE results published today (22 August 2013), Ian Toone, Senior Professional Officer (Education) with Voice: the union for education professionals, said:
"Voice sends well-deserved praise to all students, and their teachers, whose commitment, determination and hard work has earned them success.
"GCSE results are of central importance, not only to students, whose future study, employment and life chances may depend on them, but also to schools, which may find themselves closed down, put into special measures or otherwise penalised if they fall too low in performance league tables.
"Until recently, the GCSE qualifications system was internationally respected as solid and reliable. Now, however, this system is in so much flux, as a result of unprecedented meddling by the UK Government, that even the most experienced teachers, who had become experts at recognising a C grade standard of performance, can no longer predict their students’ achievements with the same degree of accuracy because it no longer seems clear what any particular grade actually means in terms of what students know, understand or can do.
"Whilst exams regulator Ofqual insists that it has fulfilled its statutory duty to maintain standards, it appears evident that it has, instead, bowed to government pressure to raise standards (thus exceeding, and possibly contravening, its statutory remit) by introducing more demanding exams in the sciences, tougher grade boundaries in mathematics, stricter moderation of teacher assessments in English and by imposing greater literacy requirements in a ranges of GCSEs, including history, geography and religious studies.
"Hence, it is not surprising that, for the first time in their 26 year history, GCSE results show a fall at every grade boundary. When compared with last year, this year’s results show a fall of 0.5 per cent in A* grades (from 7.3 to 6.8 per cent), 1.3 per cent at grades A*-C (from 69.4 to 68.1 per cent) and 0.2 per cent at grades A*-G (from 99.0 to 98.8 per cent). Such a small overall decline may seem negligible, but among 5.6 million GCSE results it is certainly significant both statistically and in terms of its impact on real people.
"It may be that GCSE grades need to be recalibrated to stem the tide of so-called ‘grade inflation’, but with further changes to come, this is most certainly only the very thin end of a much larger wedge. Secretary of State Michael Gove appears to want GCSEs to be the most rigorous qualifications in the world. This may be a laudable aim, but it would be churlish in the extreme if, in order to prove that we have the toughest examinations, we need to ensure that our results plummet further and further down the international league tables.
"Further evidence of government interference is seen in the steep increase in the number of candidates taking the individual subjects that collectively comprise the English Baccalaureate Certificate. Since this was announced as a new accountability measure in the autumn of 2010, this summer is the first full cohort that could have chosen (or been forced to choose) to study the full suite of baccalaureate subjects.
"It is significant, therefore, that this year’s exam entries have seen an increase of 19.2 per cent in geography, 16.7 per cent in history, 9.4 per cent in German, 15.5 per cent in French and 25.8 per cent in Spanish. There have also been significant increases in entries for biology, chemistry and physics.
" In some quarters, this signifies a return to traditional academic subjects which best equip students to compete in the global economic marketplace, but is this at the expense of meeting the needs of individual students by robbing them of opportunities to select GCSE options which match their strengths, interests and aspirations?
"As important as examinations certainly are, they are not the ‘be all and end all’ of education. All pupils deserve a broad, balanced and relevant education which nurtures wider values and ambitions beyond the instrumental value of certificated outcomes, and it does our children and young people a disservice if we allow this more rounded view of education to be surrendered to the demands of market economics."
