Exams: the great leap forward

GCSEs have already begun to change, and the A-level revolution comes next year. Sophia Martelli considers who benefits from the new rules – and who doesn’t

A year from now, the new A-level curriculum will hit sixth-form classrooms; changes to GSCE have already been partly implemented. The exam reforms initiated by Michael Gove are hailed either as ‘much-needed’ or ‘carnage’ depending on who you talk to.

Although controversial, most teaching professionals agree that a good sort out of exams is overdue, including Paul Redhead, a former head teacher who now works with the Council for Independent Education. Public exams have been ‘systematically devalued since the 1980s’, according to Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former special adviser. Comparing the UK’s GCSE and A-level results with their equivalents in other countries reveals a 2–3 per cent grade inflation level per year — which over ten years adds up to a lot. The format of A-levels shifted somewhere between 2005 and 2010 to reflect the modular format of GCSEs (including the ability to resit modules until the desired mark can be recorded) — although there is no record of any official decisions to make A-levels modular by the Ministry of Education, Ofqual or the exam boards.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy for everyone to agree on how the exams should change. The new curriculums were developed after the Department for Education looked at the highest-performing countries on exam league tables — from Finland to Shanghai — and applied the best of what they were doing to the English curriculum. Tougher measures have also been included. Thus in GCSEs, maths will have more emphasis on problem solving instead of formulae, and in arts subjects there will be more essays instead of multiple choice. But teachers lined up to criticise Gove over the changes in content to the history curriculum (‘half-baked’) and the manner of implementing reforms (‘undemocratic’), and there will undoubtedly be more controversy when the reforms meet pupils: the mop-up on that awaits Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan.