It can be hard to remember who the Education Secretary is. If you pop out to make a cup of tea you are liable to miss one. Since the last notable incumbent, Michael Gove, left the post in 2014 there have been a further nine education secretaries. Gillian Keegan, the holder of the office at the time of writing, was the fourth Education Secretary in five months when she was appointed in October 2022. It’s no surprise that the Government has had no education policy to speak of at all since Mr Gove left office. So here is a suggestion.
This is a week of great anxiety and, let us hope, some triumph for students across the land when the GCSE results come out. This is an annual ritual that other developed nations do without and it is time we followed their lead and abolished the GCSE. Good luck to all concerned and well done to those who have done well but in future we should all do something else.
There was a time, when pupils received the original school certificate, when most of the cohort left school at 16. It separated those who might go on to further study from those who would not. The school certificate became the O-level, which was then split in two in 1965 when the CSE was created for the less academically part of the student body. In 1988 the Thatcher government created the combined GCSE that we have today. The present school leaving age is 18 and it is not obvious what a public exam at 16 is really for.
It’s not clear why we must mark down some children as public failures before the next stage of their education
We do need to work out which students are suited to go on to do A-levels and which would be better doing T-levels or another qualification leading to a work placement. We don’t need the vast panoply of the public examination system to do that, though. Good, continuous internal assessment can do that job. By the time students are 16 many know their own minds and their own aptitudes, in any case. If this year’s results are anything like previous years, something like a quarter of all children, most of them from working- class backgrounds, will not get a single grade A or B. It’s not clear why it makes sense to mark them down as public failures before the next stage of their education.
The insistence that everyone does their GCSEs points to the real gap in the system. Last week, a third of British 18-year-olds were nervous about their A-level results but the forgotten two-thirds weren’t, because they don’t do them. The British education system provides a top-class offer to the academic elite and does a poor job by everyone else.
The Government introduced the T-level in 2020. Students follow a two-year course, which includes a work placement, in subjects such as design, surveying and planning. There are now good apprenticeship schemes, backed by employers, which offer routes out either into university or into work.
There is still a lot to do to make the curriculum as adaptable and as flexible as employers need and it is vital that practical experience is integrated with the compulsory academic student of language and mathematics.
However, let’s be optimistic because slowly and finally, after half a century of failure, maybe we are starting to add technical expertise to an academic education system. We will know that we have succeeded when T-levels get as much publicity as A-levels.
The GCSE just about made sense when it coincided with the school leaving age. You don’t want students leaving with no certificate of achievement. But that argument has now been removed and there seems to be little point in interrupting their progress to 18 with a public examination at 16 in which some will rise and some will fall. All simply to decide who goes where.
When the school certificate was abolished in 1965, leaving school with no qualifications wasn’t a sentence to unemployment. In an economy dominated by manufacturing, skilled manual labour, and a lifetime of training on the job, was plentiful. It’s not the same today. Britain is a service economy, the skills it demands are specific and the educated are paid substantially more than those who leave school with no credentials.
It’s vital that the public examination system helps as many students as possible to do this. It’s an economic imperative but, more important than that to the students getting their news this week, it’s a matter of individual justice too.
