Abolishing GCSEs would be a grave mistake – but there’s still need to reform the curriculum”

GCSEs have played a significant role in defining the landscape of education in the UK since 1986, is it time for change?

Last year the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) argued that GCSEs “hold back young people and the country as a whole” as it renewed it’s calls to call an end to GCSE exams and to introduce a new system, a belief shared by many.  A report published by the TBI recommended that a replacement to the GCSE system would involve regular assessments between ages 16 and 18 and suggested that low stake assessments take place at the end of secondary school to help “inform pupils” and “hold schools to account” over academic progress, furthermore the report outlined subjects which are referred to as part of the English Baccalaureate, or Ebacc to have played a part in causing other subjects to be “overlooked”, which means that reforms pushed by government have “stifled efforts to improve social mobility”.

The propositions laid out by the TBI seem on the surface to be perfectly sound, after all who would want the futures of young people to be held back because of a single set of exams that prioritise a set of subjects that many young people don’t even want to do? But after further examination, the TBI’s propositions are fundamentally flawed, Following the TBI’s calls for radical reform a Department for Education (DFE) spokesperson said that GCSEs and A-levels “are highly respected around the world” and provide students with a “rich and fulfilling curriculum which equips them with the skills to succeed”. The first of the DFEs points is perhaps the most important, GCSEs provided the world with an accurate idea of the standard that British students where being educated too, and it allows foreign educational institutes to select students from the UK with a relatively accurate idea of their abilities compared to others which is represented by ones GCSEs. If Britain where to scrap GCSEs for a new system as recommended by the TBI, it would first take a considerable amount of time for the rest of the world to adjust and to recognise the new standard of education that such reforms would have set in Britain, this would surely make it difficult for the thousands of Students who wish to study abroad each year to apply to foreign universities. The DFEs second argument is also correct when taking into account that many of the skills gained through Ebacc core subjects such as basic mathematics, essay writing, analysing text and more actually enable students to more effectively study subjects of their choice at A-level, so yes the argument that other non-core/Ebacc subjects at GCSE level may be overlooked is correct but students post 16 benefit with the important skills learnt at GCSE.

If the TBI was wrong about GCSE subjects being too heavily centred around Ebacc core subjects, aren’t they still right about replacing GCSE exams with a set of regular low stake assessments? Well, the problem is, this too is a heavily flawed argument. Yearly GCSE papers are a colossal task with exam boards running hugely complex operations to mark hundreds of thousands of exams a year all in time for results day, and that’s with one set of exams, to execute the same large-scale operation multiple times a year would simply be unfeasible and would demand constant costly large scale marking to be carried out by exam boards pretty much all the time which would ultimately drive up the cost of education. The solution to this would be to have schools set their own assessments and also mark them themselves, but then there’s no way of nationally having one set standard for how grades are measured against each other from school to school, furthermore Teacher bias could occur just as Ofqual discovered when students where given grades from their teachers during the Covid-19 pandemic, Studies from Russia also show that teachers tend to give higher grades to pupils with more agreeable personalities.

Though the TBI was wrong about its proposals its not wrong in intent, it’s clear that there are a number of shortcomings in our education system, many students leave school at 16 with little to no knowledge of life skills such as managing money or budgeting, how to pay taxes and how to properly articulate one’s ideas in a public forum in a debate or discussion as well as many more important skills. Perhaps the answer to this problem could be reform in secondary education with the establishment of a newly overhauled and mandatory citizenship GCSE which would in its content cover all the skills labelled above, furthermore in theory this GCSE could be sat at the age of 15, or in year 10 for most as to reduce the inevitable added workload of doing an extra subject at GCSE, perhaps such a reform could bring an end to the TBI’s claim that GCSEs “hold back young people and the country as a whole”.

Our system of GCSEs has obvious flaws, but a complete overhaul as endorsed by the TBI is a grave mistake that would practically destroy Britain’s education system. Instead, policymakers ought to push a series of minor reforms to modernise and improve our school curriculum to maximise the skills learnt by students in secondary school.