‘The problem must lie with the marking, not the exams’

The concern for me is exactly why this change is being made now.

Most people will have to accept there have been some fairly major issues over GCSEs in recent years, with the bizarre situation of results improving year on year for decades.

Now I personally believe in evolution, but I cannot imagine that we are getting more intelligent as a species on a yearly basis, or our schools would be full of academic geniuses by now, and that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case to me.

Therefore, surely the problem must lie in the marking of the exams, rather than with the exams themselves.

I’d naively thought that was the case when the row over lower marks in this summer’s English GCSEs blew up last month - clearly they were being marked more harshly than in recent years, hence the dip in results.

However, it now looks as though that dip in scores was actually politically motivated as a method for justifying the wholesale changes set to be made to the exam system.

These new exams, dubbed the EBacc’s, will be very different to the current offering, and will be focussed on a three-hour exam to be sat after two years of learning.

It seems a harsh test for those who suffer from exam-stress, one of the chief reasons the GCSE with their coursework elements were introduced in the first place.

The thinking behind the changes seems to be of the ‘old ways are the best ways’ variety - something which rarely seems to actually work in the real world.

However, those worries pale into insignificance compared to my real issue with the changes - the cost.

Now it cannot be cheap to instigate a complete overhaul of the exam system - it will certainly cost more than making improvements to the current GCSEs.

Surely in an era where public and private sector workers are facing redundancies and pay freezes while public services are cut to the bone, it is simply the wrong time to be changing an exam system for idealogical reasons.