Scrap exams

You'll get broad agreement from me about this, having spent a few months in the last year teaching in a couple of ordinary secondary schools; I recognise all of the symptoms mentioned here.

teachers under pressure to improve grades were drilling pupils for tests that were too fact-based and failed to push pupils to think critically.
'The exams we have test the first type of knowledge, but what is needed is the second,' argued Wiliam. 'We have to prepare them to think intelligently. GCSE exams are teaching 19th-century skills because of the way they are assessed.'
League tables of school performance, he added, meant that teachers at all stages of school felt pushed to 'teach to the test' and not offer a broader education.

What's more, I found it disheartening, actually, to have to teach to an exam rather than encouraging debate, engagement and being able to follow up the really interesting questions. Admittedly some of the frustration in not being able to do some of that was probably also that I was relatively inexperienced in the curricula and still learning the teaching skills, but even so it is patently true to my observation that not onloy do we end up teaching to the test but that,on the whole, doing that means we can't teach to the natural curiosity and strengths of the many.Tests and exams still tend to test only the lowest grade and least interesting kinds of learning to the detriment of students for whom they don't suit. Of course it all stays self-perpetuating then because we tend to end up with the exam succeeders running things and they tend not to understand how it can be that others don't 'get it' and blame the victims of a poorly-designededucation system. But then the 'value' of exams has been so deeply embedded in our culture that we, as a society, can hardly contemplate restructuring our systems of assessing the 'value' and aptitudes of our people.

Part of the issue is, arguably, that we are running a modded Victorian system which was really only aiming to 'deliver'enough literacy and numeracy to run the factories and to discover who were the the likely educators in the next batch to be trained to do more of the same. The Workers' Educational Movement, among others, had higher aspirations, but that was outwith the system.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'It seems that the curriculum is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
'Each year critics call for a return to 19th-century teaching styles or for a move away from them. The GCSE is a qualification fit for the 21st century. Crucially, GCSE subjects of whatever discipline have to be set and assessed to the same high standard and the independent QCA takes this fully into account.'

That quote highlights the real dilemma, but I do have to say that I think we are reaching the limits of the usefulness of the kind of exam-focussed learning we are currently engaged in.