GCSE English (Marking)

John Denham Excerpts

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the Minister on her new role, to which I am sure she will bring great energy and commitment.

Unlike the current Ministers, I have no experience of work in the media or policy think-tanks. I simply bring experience of how things work or do not work in the real world outside Westminster, where real families toil, real kids go to school and real professionals work jolly hard to achieve the best they possibly can for our young people. I have a lifetime’s experience of teaching English. The easiest exam to prepare kids for was O-level English literature, and the exam that gave the most perverse, unfair outcomes for kids was O-level English language. The Government’s theoreticians may think a return to O-level will be a good thing, but I very much doubt it.

Criterion-referenced GCSE English has gone through many changes over the years, but today’s world has been transformed from the world of 1988, when the first cohort of students took the then new school leavers’ exam introduced by the Conservative Government. In all its manifestations, however, I can say without hesitation that GCSE has been far more demanding for students than its predecessor. It is a much tougher qualification to prepare students for and has a much tougher assessment regime for them to meet, but it has been fairer—until now, when a Government obsessed with ideas rather than realities are presiding over a monumental injustice.

At its heart, the GCSE fiasco this summer is not about Ministers and MPs, or exam boards and technical stuff. It is about something a lot simpler and a lot more important: it is about whether the assessments given to young people this summer were fair. The head of Ofqual, in her outrageously flippant remark that some candidates “got lucky”, seems to recognise that she failed in her duty to ensure that the outcomes in one year were fair to all candidates. As the editor of The Times Educational Supplement wrote this week:

“Obsessed with maintaining standards between years, Ofqual has failed to maintain them within a single one. It has completely undermined confidence in the exams it is supposed to protect.”

The Ofqual report “GCSE English Awards” lets the cat out of the bag. A technical document, designed to whitewash, it is obsessed with controlling statistics, not standards. It makes it clear that young people’s achievements at 16 are capped by their achievement at 11. The whole review hinges on

“the predictions made by the exam boards of results for each GCSE…based on prior attainment data”—

key stage 2 results—so that achievement at 16 is being capped by achievement at 11. An exasperated National Union of Teachers collectively sighs:

“Such an approach begs the question—does secondary education just not matter?”

Excellent analyses by the National Association for the Teaching of English and the National Association of Head Teachers demonstrate that Ofqual and the Government are, in essence, returning to norm referencing by the back door. Although the Secretary of State, in a very brief answer to my question yesterday, said that norm referencing was off the table, it is very much on the table, and I think that there needs to be some honesty about that. It is hardly surprising that the whitewash document also includes an admission, on page 19, that

“this year’s English results have come as a shock to some schools, and some of the school-level outcomes are hard to explain”.

You bet they are, if the aim is to cover up a monumental cock-up.

What is clear to me from talking with local head teachers in the Scunthorpe area whose students have been affected is that something significant and exceptional has gone wrong this year. They are solid, decent professionals whose judgments I trust, and they are universally telling me that if we look back across their schools’ predictions for the past five years in GCSE English and GCSE maths—the two key progression qualifications—their predictions for students attaining C and above have been consistently within a 4% tolerance of the final outcomes, except for this year, when maths remains within that tolerance, but English is more than 10% out. These are professionals who know what they are doing, and they tell me that the same students predicted a C this year would have achieved a C last year.

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I will be brief, because I had the chance to speak in the main Chamber. What my hon. Friend’s professionals are telling him in Scunthorpe is precisely what professionals are telling me in Southampton. I was, with the current shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the two architects of Ofqual. We took the decision to establish an independent regulator. Does he agree that we have to face the fact that the guarantee of independence, which we delivered, was no guarantee of competence? The worst thing we can do now is to overlook the fact that Ofqual has got this wrong and to say that there is nothing that we can do to right the injustice that has been done to thousands of students this summer.

[Nic Dakin]

My right hon. Friend makes a salient and pertinent point. What is important is that young people in Scunthorpe, in Southampton and indeed throughout the land are treated fairly. The regulators recognise their own incompetence when one of them comes out with comments such as some students “got lucky”, but that is not good enough, is it? The incompetence that they recognise should not stand in the way of young people being treated fairly.

It is worth noting that, nationally, 26.7% of students doing the foundation paper in June 2011 got a C grade, while only 10.2% got a C grade in June 2012. Those statistics corroborate my local head teachers’ view that students taking the exam in June 2012 were disadvantaged compared with similar students who took the exam in June 2011.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

The reason it has gone wrong is because of the system we inherited, which was based on modular examinations. While we saw grade inflation in the UK, we were being overtaken by other countries.

[Mr Denham]

I urge the Minister to consider this point: the students do not care about the wider debate on examination standards. Something has gone wrong in the assessment of the English language examination this year. It has nothing to do with the debate about wider standards or how things are run, and it is frankly insulting—I must say that to the Minister, who is new in the job—to talk about other issues when students are wondering what will happen to them.

[Elizabeth Truss]

It is relevant, because the modular English exam was introduced by and the system was set up under the previous Government. The former Secretary of State was clear when he established Ofqual that it was an independent regulator of standards. It is not right, therefore, for Ministers or the Secretary of State to interfere with the marking process. Ofqual must conduct that investigation and the proper process is for schools and individuals, with the encouragement of MPs who feel that the treatment has not been fair in their constituencies, to apply directly to Ofqual. I have made that point clear, but there is no doubt that the long-term problems in our system have created incentives for schools and exam boards to behave in particular ways, and those issues need to be sorted out. That is the point behind the introduction of the English baccalaureate certificates. The race to the bottom between exam boards needs to end, so that we have a system that accurately reflects standards. At the moment, it does not.

I am extremely sympathetic to students who did not get the results that they expected. However, the proper course of action is through Ofqual, which is conducting the investigation, and the proper role of politicians is to reform the exam system so that we deal with issues such as modularisation, which caused these problems.