Four years ago, the press was sent into a greater-than-usual fury about the release of A-level results. For the first time, because of the pandemic, no exams had been sat. Instead, teachers submitted grades awarded and a rank order of students from best to worst. This was moderated by Ofqual to ensure that there was roughly the same distribution of marks as in previous years – and 40 per cent of grades were revised downwards. In cases where schools or individual pupils had exceeded expectations, their achievement was not recognised.
Though the government U-turned and teachers’ grades were restored, Sammy Wright identifies this in his book Exam Nation as the point that “everything beg[an] to unravel”. The Department for Education (DfE) had prioritised the distribution of grades over what each child merited “because our education system demands failure with such persistence that it seemed better to them to be unfair than to be over-generous”. Despite what they are told in assemblies, not every child can succeed if they only apply themselves: the system requires that some fail. Wright, a teacher of 22 years who at the time sat on the government’s Social Mobility Commission, calls this “a kind of mass gaslighting”: pupils “are explicitly given the language of pass or fail, and implicitly given a value system that says the cleverer you are, the better you are. And this is done in the full knowledge that not all of them are capable of a pass.”
A question runs through Exam Nation, one which Wright asks of the hundreds of children he interviews (and of himself): what is school for? For Wright, the fatal flaw in our system is illustrated by their most common answer: I need good grades so I can get a good job. This coldly transactional view has “eaten away at the basic moral purpose of education”: students no longer see education as key to becoming self-possessed, well-rounded adults, and nor does the system. Other aspects of school life – enrichment, community, personal development – are neglected. Examination was once a useful tool to measure if learning was embedded. Today schools teach to exams. “In a very real and self-defeating way, exam grades become the thing that is useful, rather than the knowledge they represent.”
How did we get here? The introduction of market forces – through league tables, Ofsted judgements, and the concept of parental choice – led us to think of education as a product. League tables were first published in 1992 and reported how many students at a school had passed GCSEs. Later, each grade was given a numerical worth, and resits counted towards them. Pupils often finished school with huge numbers of qualifications – and an equally huge point score.
When Michael Gove entered the DfE in 2010, he believed that the “everybody wins” grade inflation encouraged by league tables had lowered standards; a return to “academic rigour” was required. His new GCSE and A-level courses were purged of coursework and modules. Resits no longer counted in league tables, nor did less academic “Mickey Mouse” qualifications, and pass and entry rates for subjects in the new “English baccalaureate” (English, maths, science, languages, geography and history) were given prominence. Wright’s assessment of Gove’s time at the DfE, and of the schools Wright visits – from Michaela in Wembley, often dubbed Britain’s strictest school, to the progressive XP School in Doncaster – is measured. He would not “turn the clock back” on reforms, acknowledging the good where he sees it. He stresses that Exam Nation is not “an ideological polemic”.
Gove’s tight focus on traditional academic success was in part intended to counter what George W Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”: the idea that holding a disadvantaged child to different standards under the guise of kindness is a form of discrimination. Lower performers at school are, on average, also poorer: this argument holds that pushing them towards more vocational subjects compounds inequality. While the progressive instinct might be to individualise the curriculum, to ensure that children see their own experiences reflected back at them (for instance, teaching the works of black authors at majority-black schools), traditionalists contend that children need to be taught the same “knowledge-rich” curriculum regardless of background, so they can acquire the cultural capital that allows the middle classes to move smoothly through the halls of power.
Wright does not entirely buy this thesis: if we embrace the idea of knowledge as social currency, we risk perpetuating the ways it can be used to exclude.
In making children who lack cultural capital compete in subjects that they can see their more advantaged peers are naturally at ease with, “you are asserting to them in the strongest possible terms that who they are is not good enough”. Removing difference between children may do those who are disadvantaged a disservice. The context in which a grade was achieved, Wright argues, is important. An A grade achieved by a student living in a two-parent household who eats three meals a day is not the same, for instance, as that of a student living with an alcoholic parent in a one-bed flat.
The British view of education is, Wright believes, riven by class: the middle-class one, that “education is central to childhood… a process of optimisation”; and the working-class one, that “adult life is hard, so when you’re a kid you’d better enjoy it”. If this sounds patronising, it is informed by his experience as a head of school in Sunderland, where “disadvantage and cultural disconnect converge to create whole communities where education is… meaningless”.
The idea that communal knowledge can make the world a fairer place is an appealing one. But while individual students can and do break the link between circumstance and achievement, in aggregate disadvantaged young people still fall behind privileged peers. “From the point of view of a student who looks around them and… doesn’t buy the argument that attending school is going to get them a better job or more money, the people and institutions who make this argument… are idiots, deluded or lying.” The answer, according to Wright, is not lower expectations, but a broader concept of what constitutes worthwhile learning and academic success.
If Wright’s diagnosis is considered, his cure is at times too glancing. Only one of Wright’s proposed reforms is directly to do with exams; there is, he concludes, no better alternative. But his suggestion of replacing GCSEs is exciting. GCSEs are meant to be general, yet they operate as specialised preparatory blocks for A-level, even though 34 per cent of students don’t stay in school after 16. Wright’s “passport qualification”, which emphasises essential skills and knowledge, would remove artificial divisions between subjects and eliminate student choice over which they study, but allow agency over topics and approach, and incorporate personal development. It would be sat at 15, allowing those who fail to resit without falling behind, and others to spend a year in vocational or more academic study.
He would also “break the link between outstanding schools and overwhelmingly middle-class catchments”. Academy chains, he argues, should be run with local authority involvement to “serve the wider interest”. School catchment areas should be widened, and places distributed by lottery within five income bands, spreading disadvantage more evenly between schools. Intakes should be smaller, no more than 90 in a year group, and schools be all-through or working in pairs, to ease the transition between primary and secondary.
The coverage of fee-paying and grammar schools is too brief. Wright, who attended private school, supports Labour’s plans to impose VAT on private-school fees, and says he would “go further”, taxing their other sources of income and funnelling the proceeds into state schools, as well as abolishing grammars. Wright raises two significant issues for behaviour management – that exclusion is no punishment to a child who does not want to be in education, and that British culture glorifies the idea of the cheeky, naughty pupil – but his only suggestion here is that alternative provision requires a “radical overhaul”.
Exam Nation is compelling and complicated, much like the system it chronicles. Wright sometimes slips into sentimentality, which is easily scoffed at. Consider: “In all the ways we can answer the question What is school for? There’s a simple truth. It’s the same if we answer the question What is life for? Life… is about love.” But, on reflection, he is right: I think of lifelong friendships formed 20 years ago, and of a teacher who decided the course of my life. These are the things, as much as results, that make us who we are – and by which, once our school days are over, we measure their worth.
Exam Nation
Sammy Wright
Bodley Head, 288pp, £22
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This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone