Stop raising and lowering the GCSE high-jump bar | Michael Rosen

Did you know that an outbreak of GCSE-itis is arriving in England in a few days’ time? Most seriously affected are likely to be commentators hoping to make cheap political points about standards.

One theory that has held sway for about a hundred years is that standards are falling and as a result young people leaving school are dull, stupid, cannot count, cannot write and cannot think. As most of these no-longer-young people are now running society, this perpetual decline in standards should have caused total collapse. Has it?

It was thought several years ago by your predecessor, Michael Gove, who is one of the world’s greatest experts on this illness, that the way to raise standards was to make GCSEs harder. He was working to the principle that if you raise a high-jump bar higher, people jump higher.

This year was to be the first year that this principle was to be put to the test, but another expert, representing Ofqual, dived in before this year’s outbreak and said that the new ways of fixing the marks would not be as hard as Michael Gove had said.

Did you have anything to do with that intervention? We might have assumed that teachers, students and parents should have been told about this while the students were studying for these new GCSEs but, mysteriously, the announcement was made weeks after the exams were done and dusted.

People who study GCSE-itis draw a distinction between “criteria” referenced and “norm” referenced exams. Criteria testing fixes what is to be tested before the test is sat, and whoever achieves the criteria passes. The people responsible for GCSE-itis – exam boards, overseers of exam boards and people such as you, Ms Greening, who oversee the overseers – have come up with a better system. First they test, then they look at how the testees have performed. If it looks as if too many or too few have done well, then they move the grade boundaries. In other words, they raise or lower the high-jump bar; they fix the “norm”.

A crucial part of GCSE-itis is to pretend norm-referencing doesn’t matter. This fosters the illusion that the reason everyone takes GCSEs is so everyone can do well. In fact, the reason everyone takes GCSEs is so that a pre-determined number of pupils will fail.

GCSE-itis is bolstered by much talk of China. Someone interested in education might ask some questions about this: are the Chinese children tested representative of all children in China, or might they have been selected? If a country’s education system is closely related to that country’s values, how do China’s values match ours? How do they match up with our values on, say, freedom of expression and democracy?

But then, when GCSE-itis takes over, the matter of how well an education system produces open-minded, questioning and democratic thought is laid to one side.

One symptom of GCSE-itis is a profusion of talk about “gaps”. Experts pore over the results, create categories and say that one category does better or worse than another. Tabloids become very interested in categories such as “white boys” or “immigrants”.

I hope you avoid this because, ultimately, such categories are only relevant if one thinks white boys or immigrants are more important to talk about than why the whole system is controlled and regulated to create the “right” numbers of fails, passes, goods and very-goods. After all, for every student in a category deemed to be failing and supposedly needing to be pushed up, there’ll be another category that will have to be pushed down to make room for them. That’s how norm referencing works.

Have you ever thought why we’re stuck with thousands of students, teachers and parents suffering from GCSE-itis? Can you imagine a bold, reforming government getting into open discussion with everyone in education to find out whether we really do need a high-stakes exam for all at 16, especially one that determines the curriculum and teaching methods so much?

On the table in such a discussion might be the idea that students would be able to choose different pathways at 16 – technical, academic or mixed – and the receiving colleges would devise their own tests to decide who was suitable for pursuing which form of education for 16 to 19-year-olds. These tests could be criterion-referenced so that colleges took students who could do the things best suited to the courses.

Instead of futile comparisons with China, why not take a look at countries trying this approach?

Yours, Michael Rosen