I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’
‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’.
Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed of their professionalism, were teaching physics GCSE, rather than physics, and Spanish A-level, rather than Spanish. Our schools were no longer teaching science and languages, but exam techniques. Genuine academic and independent learning was being sacrificed: ‘A-levels do absolutely nothing to encourage scholarship,’ said Mike Tomlinson, a previous chief inspector of schools. The winners in the exam game were the canny teachers and pupils who had worked out precisely what box-ticking markers were looking for as they sifted through piles of exam scripts every June and July. Why, I concluded, did Britain subject its schoolchildren to so many more tests and exams than countries doing better educationally and economically than us?
Little surprise that grade inflation got caught up in this riptide, with the numbers of top grades at A-level increasing threefold. Exams are important, I wrote, but by allowing them to become all-important, and making them so prescriptive, we were damaging the very people we were trying to help. In education, as elsewhere, not everything that counts can be counted.
That cover article appeared some 16 years ago.
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