Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Nicholas Dakin Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

Having a good look at our examination system is a valid thing to do. Indeed, the Chair of the Education Committee has reminded us that next Tuesday it will publish its report into the matter, and I know from my time serving on the Committee that it will have fully interrogated the issues and will produce a robust report to drive forward policy.

Such a principled, considered approach contrasts with the Secretary of State’s way of doing business—by hunch, lunch and leak. Indeed, after sitting through 40 minutes of his speech today, I was still no clearer at the end about his proposals. It was a content vacuum, I am afraid, but things need addressing. Are there plans to scrap the national curriculum at 14 years old, and would that allow schools and colleges greater flexibility to offer a more skills-based curriculum to those young people who prefer a more practical, vocational approach? Will the millions of pounds—a sum that has doubled in the past 10 years—being spent on examinations be reduced?

At the heart of the Secretary of State’s leak to the Daily Mail, there seemed to be a half-baked idea about some back to the future, imaginary utopia, enshrined in a return to O-levels and CSEs. I fear that that has far more to do with clever politicking than with intelligent policy making, however, and that the Secretary of State is keen to deliver soundbites for the Tory tabloids rather than sound policies for the young people of today and UK plc.

It is all a bit like a Monty Python sketch in which someone says, “Exams were much harder in my day. I had to recite poems and parse sentences.” The reply would be, “Recite poems and parse sentences? You were lucky. I had to recite the complete works of Shakespeare and then write an essay on a day in the life of a pound note.” Seriously, however, people like to believe that things were harder in the past, although the evidence is far from clear, and the Secretary of State is tapping into a populist instinct: nostalgia politics.

One of the few things I know a bit about is preparing young people for exams. I have prepared them for a range of exams: CEEs, CSEs, O-levels, A-levels, S-levels, AS-levels, BTECs. You name it, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have prepared young people for it, but in terms of setting and assessing standards, the worst exam that I ever prepared people for was O-level English, which was a total lottery, so if the Secretary of State thinks that going back to something like that will improve standards, he really is on another planet: planet dogma, or planet not in this place.

When Sir Keith Joseph was introducing the changes, he made very clearly the case for their necessity, stating that

“the system we propose will be tougher but clearer and fairer…it will be more intelligible to users…better than O-levels…and better than CSE…it will stretch the able more; and…stretch the average more.”—[Official Report, 20 June 1984; Vol. 62, c. 306.]

I believe, from my professional experience, that that is what the GCSE has done. That does not mean it is perfect, or that it does not need improving, but any idea about going back to the 1950s, and to exam systems that may or may not have been appropriate for that time, is unfortunate.

It is worth noting, however, that the debate about an exam at 16 years old is actually rather odd and anachronistic, because, with the raising of the participation age, the qualification that young people leave with at 18 years old is what really matters. Focusing so much attention on what happens at 16 misses the point, because with rising participation levels, the main thing is the skills, attributes and experiences that young people leave school with at 18 to allow them, one hopes, into a world of work.

One of the big problems regarding aspiration for young people is the fact that young people’s unemployment is at a record high on this Government’s watch. That has a genuine impact on aspiration in classrooms. I am afraid that despite the skills, expertise and professionalism of those great teachers, led by great head teachers, up and down the land, that remains the context in which they are working. As people providing policy and governance, one of our gifts should be to produce a mechanism to enable young people to move into employment and ensure that they have the proper skills, attributes and aptitudes to do well in it.