MONTH 2021 71

holding passports to the elite Russell Group uni-
grades, elite universities are now setting their own
versities, other institutions are suffering a ruinous
drop in recruitment.
Williamson now strikes a genial note, brush-
ing aside complaints about grade inflation by say-
ing students “deserve to be rewarded” after all the
pandemic disruption. But if the guiding princi-
ple of assessment is being nice, then the system—
surely—is sunk.
Q2. Take three identically able students. Olivia
gets AAB in 2020, when more than 38 per cent
of results in England are A or A*, compared to
25 per cent in 2019. Karim gets AAA in 2021,
when almost 45 per cent are A or A*. What
should Jack get in 2022, when exams are almost
back to normal?
entrance exams.
Even if picking out exceptional talent has got
harder amid all those top grades, one might still
hope that they reflect a positive transformation
of real average attainment. Sadly, there is scant
evidence of that. Andreas Schleicher is director of
education and skills at the OECD, heads up PISA,
the Olympics of school performance, and was once
described by Michael Gove as “the most impor-
tant man in English education.” “The UK is at one
end of the spectrum: everything is standardised,
and assessment is very high stakes,” he told me.
Yet he regards the UK as an “average performer”
educationally. (Finland has no standardised test-
ing, and is one of PISA’s gold medallists).
The Covid fiasco has amplified calls for a
rethink. John Major and eight former education

Failing the test

This year, unlike 2020, schools have been able
to choose between a variety of assessment meth-
ods (raising questions about comparability). This
apparent freedom has spawned vast compensa-
tory rituals of probity, with students (ironically)
sitting multiple tests, and teachers filling out end-
Another summer of exam chaos has revealed anew how English education less forms for exam boards. We end up in the worst
somehow manages to combine narrowness, neurosis, inequality <and> a lack of rigour. of all worlds: ballooning bureaucracy <and> the
erosion of standards.
Proper assessment is important, but as things stand, pupils are suffering pointless pain If all must have prizes, achievements lose their
value. The teachers who, by dint of strange cir-
ELIANE GLASER cumstance, found themselves newly empowered to
grade their pupils, appeared to be tortured about
secretaries recently told the <Times’s> new Edu-
cation Commission that our methods of assess-
ment need an overhaul. A review commissioned by
the National Education Union will report by the
end of this year. A campaign, Rethinking Assess-
ment, has been co-founded by Tony Blair-speech-
writer-turned-teacher Peter Hyman, who set up
the innovative School 21 in East London and is
now a co-director of the multi-academy trust and
school reform group Big Education. “There’s a
massive coalition now for radical change,” Hyman
told me. “The question is exactly what form that
change will take.”

I
magine you are Education Secretary Gavin Wil-
liamson. It is 13th August 2020, and the algorithm
employed by Ofqual to “moderate” the teacher-
assessed A-level grades, which followed the pandemic
cancellation of exams, has come under intense fire.
The results are out, and teachers in England have had almost
40 per cent of the grades they awarded marked down.
Q1. Do you:
A. Scrap the algorithm, bowing to the concerns of prominent
figures such as Jon Coles, a former Department for
Education director-general, who warned you in early July
that it was flawed;
B. Stick with the algorithm, citing the instruction you issued
to Ofqual in March to ensure that the distribution of grades
“follows a similar profile to that in previous years”;
Or C. Dither for five days, defending the system as “robust,”
before finally performing a U-turn, claiming you have only
just discovered the algorithm is unfair, and following the
decision already taken in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland to simply go with the teachers’ grades.
No marks for choosing the correct answer, but the trick-
ier follow-up question is whether last summer’s saga merely
reflects Williamson’s own (undoubted) shortcomings, or is
instead a reflection of the confused way in which all pol-
iticians—and perhaps many of us voters too—approach
exams. Have we got any coherent idea of what we want them
to do?
Labour leader Keir Starmer hailed Williamson’s capitu-
lation as “a victory for the thousands of young people who
have powerfully made their voices heard.” It’s true that the
algorithm did threaten to prevent high-achievers at schools
in poorer areas from transcending their circumstances.
But last year’s abortive marking-down of disadvantaged
kids was really just an automated version of what happens
every year with little public outcry. And getting rid of it
promptly created other problems, as grades went up across
the board.
Oversubscribed universities asked applicants to defer
full courses or choose an alternative subject. This year, with
minimal moderation, the marks have risen even higher.
Students with places at the most coveted medical schools
have been offered £10,000 to switch institution, despite the
government funding extra places. With more youngsters
explicitly declaring one piece of work to be better
than another. In that, they are in tune with a wider
crisis of judgment in our society. But since higher
education and the job market are ever-more com-
petitive, teachers can hardly be blamed for giving
their students the benefit of the doubt—even if the
cumulative effect does nobody any good.
The English system is unusual for having
such decisive exams at 18; universities in other
countries are far less stratified. Indeed, English
pupils are among the most tested in the world, but
the irony is we exhibit collective unease about—
even a collective inability to—produce any mean-
ingful results.
Within two years, in primary school alone,
standardised assessments will be inflicted on chil-
dren in Reception, Year 1, Year 2, Year 4 and Year
6: a gruelling regime for teachers and pupils alike
that’s opposed by campaigning groups such as
More than a Score. For a lot of pain, we get little
gain. After running this gauntlet right through to
GCSE and then A-levels, pupils are emerging to
find that the results might not count for much—
in order to filter the enormous numbers with top
The logic of the protestors’ placards proclaim-
ing “teachers know best” is that we’d do well
to cancel exams forever. But teachers are not
immune to unconscious bias, and in the absence
of formal consistency, private schools press home
their advantage. Last year, despite the hated
algorithm’s notorious suppression of high-fly-
ing marks in low-performing schools, it turned
out that teachers actually gave individual pupils
from graduate homes a 15 per cent relative boost
compared with the algorithm. And in this sec-
ond year of teacher assessment, the proportion of
entries from private schools resulting in the top
A* is up by 12 percentage points, compared to a
4-point rise in state comprehensives and 2-point
rise at state sixth form colleges. Race attainment
gaps widened too. As well as perverse in its results,
“teacher assessment is incredibly hard to do,”
Mary Richardson of UCL’s Institute of Education
told me, because teachers are “under so much
pressure to show improvement.”
So if teachers don’t necessarily “know best,”
which kinds of standardised assessments should
we go for?
72 ESSAYS SUBCATEGORY TITLE
Q3. Set out the case for and against exams. Use evidence to
back up your answer.
I got BBD at my comprehensive sixth form, but having
gained a place at Oxford through the (now-abolished) two-E
offer route, I did well in my finals, by (I’m convinced) pre-
tending to be a boy, making confident, sweeping arguments
in big, bold handwriting. The experience was intense—quiv-
ering in my black-and-white costume as the Examination
Schools bell tolled—but it was also thrilling; and whatever
setbacks I’ve had since, nobody can take my First away from
me. (Although I’ll admit to being irked that in my day that
put me in the top 10 per cent of Oxford graduates, now it’s
over 30 per cent). Exams are a rite of passage, a charac-
ter-building drama, and the results are a definitive stamp
of approval (if things go well, of course). There’s a reason
newspapers sport snaps of students—invariably female and
attractive of course—hugging joyfully.
Sam Freedman was an expert advisor to Gove when he
was education secretary and is now a senior fellow at the
Institute for Government and an adviser to the education
charity Ark. “Exams are by far the most reliable way we
have of comparing people to each other,” he told me. High
stakes makes learning stick. Revision strengthens informa-
tion retrieval. We may have the internet in our pockets, but
to find the most accurate information you need to know
which search terms to use.
On the negative side, exams are a single-day snapshot.
They prioritise performance under pressure over deep
knowledge, and are notoriously stressful: PISA has found
that pupils in the UK are among the most anxious in the
world, more anxious even than their counterparts in exam-
mad China and Japan. Worst of all, they turn teachers,
pupils and examiners into robots. Shaped by the National
Curriculum, league tables, and the rise of increasingly-
automated marking (AI was edging its way into the system,
even before the algorithm), pupils expect to be spoon-fed.
Rationally, perhaps, they demand soul-sapping “exam tech-
nique” classes.
Put to one side any unease about what this means for
the future of the questioning citizenry on which a healthy
democracy depends, and think purely about the conse-
quences for education. It is becoming a series of arbitrary,
circumscribed and formulaic exercises. “The reproduction
of subject matter knowledge is quite easy to put in a tight,
multiple-choice test,” Schleicher told me, citing maths as
an obvious example; “but if you want to critically assess cre-
ative work, you need a different set of tasks, and this is at
the moment not so well integrated in the UK.”
I spoke to Beatrice Coldwell, a 19-year-old from West
Yorkshire, about how the chaos of last year contributed to
her missing out on her preferred course at Manchester Uni-
versity—but it turned out something else dismayed her even
more. “The whole assessment process, though, was flawed
even without all that,” she told me, describing how, after an
PROSPECT
inspiring Year 12 exploring big ideas and literary texts in
all their complexity, the shift to exam preparation in Year
13 changed everything. “It’s horrific, it just drains essays of
their creativity. You pick the quotes you can remember eas-
ily, rather than the ones that are multifaceted. When we
wrote practice paragraphs, they’d always have to be in this
specific format: point, evidence, explain, link” (the mind-
numbing PEEL formula). “I didn’t read poetry for months
afterwards,” she tells me. Luckily, she resat through the
second year of assessment chaos, and is now off to study far
away, at the University of London Institute in Paris.
The archaic ceremony of exam hall, pen and paper is
ever-less applicable in later life—and not only because
hand-writing has almost disappeared everywhere apart
from school. Peter Hyman points to the appalling decline
of practicals in science: “we’ve got to the absurd situation
where to be a good chef within our system, it’s all about
whether you can write an exam about nutrition for two
hours rather than cooking a meal.” Companies such as
PWC and KPMG are now developing their own skills-based
assessments: “they want problem-solvers, collaborators and
good communicators,” Hyman said.
”Dus qui doloreptajgighghs porerionse
pre, sequis disaudis expdhgunt laut mint
porepudijhgjhgjkg”
And finally, the system of “comparable outcomes”
designed to ensure consistency over time in normal years
(which the 2020 algorithm was attempting to simulate) has
been critiqued as a cap on aspiration and school improve-
ment. The “forgotten third” of 16-year-olds in England
who do not gain a “standard pass” in English or Maths (a
C in old money, called a “4” since a 2017 translation of let-
ters into numbers) are simply condemned to keep retaking
them during sixth form, usually without success.
There is no shortage of alternatives; some are already in
use in English schools, state as well as private. The Interna-
tional Baccalaureate keeps the curriculum broad from 16
to 18. The Extended Project Qualification, equivalent to 50
per cent of an A-level, can be either a 5,000-word essay or an
“artefact”—a musical composition, exhibition, or app—with
accompanying commentary. Universities have been experi-
menting with open-book and open-web exams. Coursework,
abolished by Gove, has some detractors: it makes stress per-
manent, and cheating is common; although plagiarism
detection software is evolving. Digitisation may offer ways
to track students’ progress as they learn. It gets slightly
creepy, as pupils end up continually sitting an “exam” even
when assessment is a mile from their mind, but some think
that’s no bad thing: “one of the biggest mistakes that we
made in the last few 100 years when we industrialised edu-
MONTH 2021 ESSAYS SUBCATEGORY TITLE
coursework?
cation was to divorce assessment from learning,”
Andreas Schleicher told me.
Students at Envision schools in California pub-
licly defend portfolios of work to peers, teachers,
and members of the community: high stakes in a
good way. At another American school network,
the New York Performance Standards Consor-
tium, pupils devise their own assessments through
class discussion. In Victoria, Australia, students are
tested on “critical and creative thinking”: for exam-
ple, 16-year-olds might design and enact an escape-
room scenario—a team-building activity where
players must solve puzzles in order to be “released.”
Diversity brings benefits: “some students might
excel in an open-ended written essay, others might
do well on multiple choice, others express them-
selves orally,” Schleicher told me; “the more vari-
ety you have, the more chance you have of being
fair.” Undergraduates are assessed in a number of
ways: observation, collaborative work and vivas—
the last of these enable examiners to probe pat
answers, and dig out promise that lacks polish.
In Canada, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning
advocates a veritable smorgasbord of assessment
options—from Socratic dialogue to comics, sculp-
ture to podcasts.
There are ways to make teacher assessment
more accurate, too: Tim Brighouse, former chief
commissioner of schools, would apply the uni-
versity system of internal marking and exter-
nal moderation. “It’s not surprising there’s bias
in teacher assessments, as they’re not properly
taught how to eliminate it,” Richardson told me.
Solutions include blind marking, swapping scripts
between schools, and a technique called compar-
ative judgement which involves multiple markers
arranging scripts in rank order (as Sam Freedman
notes, it’s easier to say one piece of work is better
than another than to assign work a grade).
While they wait for the revolution, some schools
are putting the existing drivers to better use. “If
you believe in a broad education,” Hyman told me,
“you need to measure the full education offer.”
73
School 21 enshrines the principles of “head, hand,
and heart,” and tests not just knowledge (in the
form of traditional GCSEs and A-levels) but also
practical and interpersonal skills. In its arsenal is
an “oracy assessment toolkit” to evaluate spoken
responses to “talking points”—”critically exam-
ining ideas and views expressed,” but also “turn-
taking.” It is admirable, even if the language
illustrates how assessment renders everything—
even designing an escape room—somewhat grey.
Other schools are doing less testing altogether:
Olly Newton—executive director of the educational
charity Edge Foundation, and another co-founder
of Rethinking Assessment—is working with the
Bohunt Education Trust academy chain based in
Hampshire to slim down its GCSE programme,
allowing other activities to be accommodated, such
as an (outdoors-heavy) “forest school.”
Scrapping GCSEs is a low-hanging fruit: here,
progressive campaigners have the support of
Conservatives including Robert Halfon, chair
of the Commons Education Select Committee.
Even Kenneth Baker, who introduced GCSEs as
Thatcher’s education minister in 1988, accepts
they’re now redundant. Why? The original idea
was to ensure everyone left school with some-
thing, but neither half of that any longer applies.
Not everyone does get “something” (D and E
grades—let alone Gs—were very soon understood
by the system as fails) and very few are any longer
leaving then at all. Back in 1950, 93 per cent of
pupils left school by 16 and 7 per cent stayed on;
now those figures are precisely reversed. Very few
other countries have exams at 16.
As Freedman points out, however, 70 per cent
of students move to a different institution at 16,
often via selection based on GCSE results. “Every
time you put selection into a system, you distort
the curriculum by creating high stakes,” Freed-
man told me. The greatest distortion is at A-level:
“at the moment, whether we say so or not, our
behaviour implies that the main function of sec-
ondary education is essentially to help higher and
further education to select,” he said. Universi-
ties, and particularly sixth forms, do not have to
be selective as they are in England: in many coun-
tries they are not. If we followed their direction,
some of the pressures and problems in our exam
system might fade.
But there is no need to wait for a recasting of
the whole system to rationalise assement. Many
of the experts I spoke to cited cumulative portfo-
lios (sometimes called the comprehensive learn-
ing record) as their ideal approach. “I was a CSE
type student,” Richardson told me, referring to
74 ESSAYS SUBCATEGORY TITLE
the old pre-GCSE exam for those the system deemed non-
academic. “I left school at 16, with very few qualifications.
So I had to slowly build up my record of achievements over
time while I was working. And for me, that worked.” Peter
Hyman predicts that “in 10 years’ time, everyone will leave
school with a URL. [PQ] And that will be your passport for
employers. The radical idea is to say to secondary schools:
you don’t need to be sifting people. You just need to be col-
lecting their own strengths together.”
Q4. Identify which of the following statements
is true:
1. Testing promotes excellence and provides the opportunity
to achieve justified success.
2. Testing is unnecessary in a world where we invest to
create unlimited job opportunities and reimagine education
as lifelong learning.
3. Life isn’t fair, but you have to play the game.
It’s a tricky one. Exams were introduced in the 19th cen-
tury to replace nepotism with a more equitable allocation
of scarce educational benefits; but privilege will find a way
in education as everything else, and real meritocracy never
arrived (some universities, including Oxbridge, now end up
endeavouring to re-interpret results by adjusting for appli-
cants’ backgrounds). We test students relentlessly, but
shield them from disappointment; and then cover our eyes
when the majority find they are ill-equipped to secure a ful-
filling job.
While the vast wealth gap goes untackled, concern for
social justice has been transposed onto educational stand-
ards, perhaps because unlike with wealth there is an appar-
ent way to, in the government’s favourite phrase, “level up”
without any need for anyone to be levelled down: “just give
everyone As.” But as with those suddenly oversubscribed
university courses, this creates its own problems. As we’ve
seen in this year’s widening of the state-private gap, even a
devalued educational currency doesn’t end up fairly shared.
Besides, knowledge and intellectual inquiry will be dam-
aged if they’re used to paper over economic inequality.
Some propose achieving fairness instead by raising voca-
tional qualifications to “parity of esteem” with academic
ones. The problem is that such divisions always map onto
existing social faultlines, tainting the vocational side: the
government’s plan to substitute BTECs with T-levels is
only the latest in a line of rebrands—Whitehall, after all,
initially talked up the secondary “moderns” as attractive,
more practically focused counterparts of grammars in the
post-war system, but the reality of their standing could not
for long be disguised. As Olly Newton points out, medicine
and engineering are vocational qualifications, but their
high status means they’re classified as academic.
PROSPECT
Simply grading things higher or proclaiming things more
esteemed takes us nowhere: 85 per cent of English schools
are now rated “Good” or “Outstanding,” when it is plain
that the system is far from perfect. I can’t help suspecting
that if we could only muster adequate inputs in terms of
investment—especially in terms of teacher training (the
secret of Finland’s success)—then we might find we could
expend less energy obsessively measuring outputs.
It is time, surely, to recognise that turning everything into
a market leads to gaming and rewards that can’t be trusted.
Let us instead develop a more rounded system that—yes—
still unflinchingly tests particular aptitudes when that is
relevant and can be meaningfully done, but one that also
nurtures the individual and serves the collective.
Tim Brighouse would like to see a broader qualification
at 18—part exam, part record of achievements, part long-
term project—that reflects a more idealistic conception of
education’s purpose. “We want people to grow up thinking
for themselves and acting for others,” he told me. “We want
them to have a range of qualities. We want them to be them-
selves, have fulfilling lives, and contribute to the fulfillment
of others.”
So what are the chances my own primary-school-age
kids will avoid the sausage factory? Olly Newton, who was
once a civil servant, thinks top-down change will be a ten-
year process. “Within the department of education, current
ministers are just not interested in this at all,” he told me.
“But amongst wider policymakers, as well as teachers, par-
ents, and young people themselves, there’s a huge amount
of interest.”
And that matters. For Hyman—who remember, has
looked at policy from inside No 10 before he moved to the
world of education—perhaps 80 per cent of change is always
“bottom-up.” Even before the votes of parents call time on
a system that works for no-one, innovative schools will try—
indeed are already tryings—thing, and “politicians will
respond to what’s happening on the ground.”
So in the end, change will come. But the great challenge
is to ensure it is simultaneously radical and rigorous. That
means testing less overall, testing more creatively and effec-
tively, and being more courageous in our judgements: only
then will we start to see some real results.
Eliane Glaser is
leaving school?