That time of year approaches when we ritually sacrifice 40% of our 16-year-olds to mark them down as failures. Exam season is coming up – that summer rite when we sit down all the young, hunched over cramped desks day after day for weeks, to sit far too many GCSE papers. The ceremony has one great national purpose: to elevate the 60% who pass their crucial 5 GCSEs including maths and English to a superior destiny on a level 3 course and up – and to stamp down on the rest. Over two thirds of those failing to get that vital maths and English grade 4 are from families in the bottom fifth of incomes.
Then we force them through it again and again in resits most will fail again and again. Dividing the sheep from the goats is harsher after this government ordered everyone failing maths and English to keep resitting between the ages of 16 and 18: colleges and sixth forms lose their funding for any pupil who doesn’t keep resitting. Those hoping they were leaving behind schooling they failed (or that failed them), to escape into the green pastures of a further education college, perhaps for BTecs and City & Guilds qualifications, find they are forced to keep taking the English and maths GCSE medicine. Without grade 4, many courses are closed to them – whole vistas of new horizons, anything above level 2, however good they might be at, say, graphic design, cabinet making, gardening, art, caring, engineering or cooking. “Not everyone needs grade 4 English and maths,” says David Hughes, head of the Association of Colleges.
To make matters worse, the government is abolishing generally recognised BTecs and City & Guilds – “a car crash”, says Hughes. The government claims these get in the way of spreading higher standard T-levels, “but T-levels can never take more than 5-10% of students as they need 45-day work placements that not enough employers can offer”. Labour will pause this bonfire of diverse qualifications, but many courses will have closed down by then.
It’s all about to get much worse. From this September, those without that grade 4 will be forced to spend 3 hours a week on English and 4 hours on maths out of their total 15 hours a week, or their school or college loses any funding for them. “That doesn’t leave much time for anything else. It will put them off education altogether,” Hughes warns. Some will survive this resit hell and become highly skilled in all manner of occupations, those skills we all rely on. But what was the point of failing them?
Here comes a very good idea. AQA, a charity and the biggest of the GCSE and A-level exam factories, has assembled experts of all kinds to plan an entirely new approach to exams and educate everyone in essential life skills. This time, there should be no more pointless stigmatising of those with talents not suitable for the narrow path to Oxbridge. It is starting on the maths monster. Why does this country, more than others, suffer a maths phobia? “I was rubbish at maths,” is an especially British trope, says the AQA report on which the plan is based.
Maths GCSE is designed as a staging post to higher maths. It is abstract and full of things that none but specialists will need. To function in society everyone needs to read, write, count and use the internet, but not everyone needs quadratic equations, trigonometry or an understanding of pi. Everyone does need to understand compound interest for pensions and debt; to understand APR, income tax and national insurance on a payslip, a mortgage, VAT, how to estimate risk in savings or shares and odds in gambling. Estimating matters more than precision, says Hughes: is this restaurant bill abroad roughly right according to the exchange rate? Spot an errant nought by instinct. But these skills are not what GCSE maths gives you.
The big idea is that everyone should take basic exams covering everyday numeracy, literacy and digital fluency: they just need to pass, no grade, no contest, like passing a driving test. The AQA study finds graduates need this too: when it’s a universal certificate of adulthood showing every employer what you know, it will not be seen as an inferior qualification sneered at like “functional maths”, which AQA says has failed as an option, partly because it’s too much like GCSE maths in style and attitude.
This is not a written exam taken on a set day and place, sight unseen; not another thumbscrew that catches out unfortunates who suffer a disaster on that day – taken ill or consumed by a family drama. It’s a set of modules online to be taken any time, even on a smartphone, with instant feedback suggesting helpfully where you went wrong. Made a mistake? It feeds easier questions, gradually building up as you learn. Try the module again whenever.
Before the Gradgrinds have a seizure, this would run alongside traditional GCSEs and A-levels (though this style of exam may soon win out). This qualification would let students progress on to many courses currently barred without the dreaded grade 4. It could be gamified, to make it fun. Modules could be taken from age 14 to 19, or at any time in life. It wouldn’t be that easy, as we all know, struggling to calculate what the price was before VAT was added, or what your pension might yield in 18 years. Adults could take it so that employers no longer need set their own tests for basic competence.
The panel, including Hughes, the children’s commissioner, a Tory education adviser, a Lloyds banker and education experts, will produce its exam plan for maths in June (with the rest to follow), for consultations and ideas from teachers, employers and students.
It needs political buy-in. Labour has promised curriculum revision and enrichment, so that’s a chance to take this up and a chance to stop the compulsory GCSE resits. This looks like a national future of better literacy, numeracy and digital fluency for all, and an end to tormenting so many 16-year-olds.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
