Observing England's GCSE resits policy as an outsider

I'm very aware that opining about the rights and wrongs of exams in days before results are due out won't be universally welcomed.

But seeing the familiar images this summer of FE colleges turning themselves upside down to accommodate GCSE Maths and English resits (and particularly this Think Further piece from Cath Sezen) has prompted me to recall why I've always been sceptical about the 'forced' GCSE resits policy England has adopted over the past decade.

It's perhaps because I'm an outsider these days, albeit one who still has regular contact with England's FE and skills system, that I can't help but think there must be a better way of helping 16-19 year-olds (not to mention adults, who are rarely mentioned in this debate) to become more numerate and literate.

The Condition of Funding for learners without 'good' GCSEs in Maths and English was part of what followed the original Wolf Report in 2011; it accompanied a repudiation of the Skills for Life strategy that had been pursued by the Blair and Brown governments during the previous decade, and marked a broader deprioritising of adult education continued ever since by successive British governments.

GCSE was suddenly positioned by policymakers as the 'gold standard'; or rather as the thing employers were likely to have heard of, even if unlikely to have ever looked closely at a spec! It marked a reversal of the policy response to criticisms levelled at GCSE a few years earlier in the Tomlinson Report for not having enough real life relevance and needing something else alongside it to measure 'functional' capabilities*.

Advocates of the resits policy tend to focus their arguments around three main themes:

• The importance of getting a qualification that's 'valued' by employers and other gatekeepers (and not palming them off with an inferior 'alternative').

• That it helps to counter a culture of 'low expectations' by giving 16-18 year-olds who've not previously met the grade a chance to show they can do it.

• That it has driven up the quality of teaching and learning in post-16 settings.

Hand-writing at a tiny desk whilst crammed into a large draughty/stuffy hall. Is that really the best way to assess people's literacy and numeracy capabilities?

I have some sympathy with the first argument, although being 'recognised' isn't the same as being a valid or appropriate measure. I completed my GCSE English during the brief period when there was an option of 100% assessment by coursework, an approach I much preferred and lamented when ministers intervened to stop a couple of years later. I'd have hated the current assessment model for GCSE, not because I wouldn't have been able to navigate it successfully (probably...) but frankly because I'd have struggled to see the point of loading two years' work entirely on terminal exams. That might say more about my preferences and anxieties, but there is a wider point about neurodivergent learners being considered to have 'failed' if they can't climb the same tree in the same way.

Having spent more than two decades working with so-called 'alternatives' to GCSE (not that they were framed in those terms until the latter half of that period), I am irritated by the snobbery that at times has derided them as "stepping stones", "for the not very bright", a "consolation prize", or recently even the "Jim Crow qualification"(seriously...?😩). They were designed outside the straitjacket of the GCE/GCSE system and with a different purpose - not just to stratify 15-16 year-olds. The other 'skills' qualifications I worked with weren't/aren't perfect, and I'm certainly less keen on the post-2019 iteration of Functional Skills than its predecessor, but they have at least tended to focus on competence without explicitly capping how many learners were 'allowed' to pass (and in the case of 16+ learners it's not event their own performance that influences where grade boundaries are set, rather the relative strength of that year's Year 11s compared with previous years).

Then of course there's another ‘ignored’ group: ESOL (and EAL) learners, with policy expectations still pointing them towards the one-size-fits-all holy grail of a grade 4 GCSE. In terms of 16-18 performance measures, ESOL Skills for Life qualifications are even less valued than Functional Skills (even though both were historically derived from the same standards).

I've no problem with high expectations and encouraging people to do as well as they possibly can; although I'm less keen on people enforcing conformity by projecting their definitions of what 'success' should look like. I bristle at the idea that improving GCSE grades and ultimately achieving at/above grade 4 (C, for those of us outside England) is all that matters, and especially the framing of maths and English as something people need only endure until they 'pass' - rather than capabilities and skillsets we all continue to develop throughout life (regardless of which piece of paper we happen to hold).

More welcome has been the renewed focus on maths and English pedagogy over the last few years, at least within 16-18 contexts (again, adults are barely mentioned). Of course, much of this has been framed around preparing for resits and making 'measurable progress', although the greater cross-fertilisation of ideas between practitioners working in school vs FE settings has surely been a good thing. Yet I still worry about washback and extent to which teaching inevitably becomes focused on passing exams, at the expense of broader perspectives of social practice. The recent edict about the Condition of Funding having to involve "in person, whole class, stand-alone teaching" further reinforces the notion that maths and English must be done to, rather than with.

Much as I don't want to see high stakes qualifications banished (hey, I used to work for an awarding organisation!) I do worry that focusing everything around their achievement risks hitting the target whilst missing the point.

*In case you were wondering where the idea for Functional Skills qualifications came from, although they were also intended to converge the Key Skills and Adult Numeracy/Literacy qualifications dating from 2000-01).