Former Scarborough headteacher cautiously welcomes exam changes
A former Scarborough primary school headteacher is cautiously welcoming the changes to exams next year in England.
A former Scarborough primary school headteacher is cautiously welcoming the changes to exams next year in England.
It is after yesterday's announcement that A-Level and GCSE students will receive more generous grades and can preview exam topics.
It is to help offset the impact of lost-learning during the coronavirus pandemic.
Anne Swift, an Executive Member at the National Education Union, said:
"We're glad that the Government are considering all the issues around exams but we think they could go further. This would have been a good time to look at the exams and assessment systems in the round; and look at the whole of the way that we acknowledge and celebrate what young children have achieved and what they know and can do.
"They could have moved to look at combination of coursework, robustly moderated teacher assessments, and maybe some element of examinations within the system as well. So different ways of assessing that would have suited the learning needs of more children.
"There's already lots and lots, I think around 700,000 children, who have missed considerable chunks of face-to-face teaching in school; so they're disadvantaged alongside other peers who maybe haven't had to have so much time out of their schools.
"The system that's based on what we call 'criterion reference' where there's criteria written down like 'if you can do these things' and 'show these things' then you will get that grade, no matter how many people get that grade. So there are other ways of looking at how we recognise what youngsters have achieved.
"Whilst students are ranked 9-1 in the grading system that still doesn't help. So those children who've been out of school for longer, had more disruption, had less opportunity to prepare for their exams then they go down the rank order. The adjusting isn't really a solution to that.
"What it needs is for children to have the maximum amount of time for learning both in primary schools and secondary schools; rather than being coached to pass a test that doesn't really add value to their educational experience so we wish they'd look at that as well."