Now more than ever the ‘I’ in IGCSE is for ‘independent’

I always thought that rugby was invented so that there was no chance of public schoolboys having to meet grotty kids from football-playing state schools on the playing fields. But until recently all children, whether in the state or independent sector, did at least take the same exams. Until, that is, there emerged a great divide between GCSE and IGCSE.

In January, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan confirmed that international GCSEs, or IGCSEs, will no longer be counted in school performance tables once the first reformed GCSEs start to be taken in 2017. The new courses, like IGCSEs, will be examined at the end of the course, not in modular instalments. The move, which reverses a decision by her predecessor, Michael Gove, is the latest instalment of a long saga which has driven a wedge between the state and independent sectors.

GCSEs, introduced in the late 1980s, had long been criticised for their modular structure and for the large amount of coursework they involve. A decade ago some independent schools decided to do something about it. They noticed that the IGSCEs still offered by examination boards for the benefit of English-language schools abroad had retained the structure of the old O-level: pupils were taught for two years and then examined at the end. Moreover, they discovered that your school didn’t have to be abroad to be able to offer the exam.

There was one problem, or maybe it wasn’t a problem at all. The exam performance tables produced by the Department for Education failed to recognise the IGCSE, with the result that schools taking them would appear at the bottom of the tables, with a score of zero. Highly selective independent schools sank below the worst-performing comprehensives.