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Students departing for study leave in preparation for their crucial GCSEs and A Levels has got one teacher thinking about the true value of qualifications.
Of course, a strong set of exam results are a vital leg up to the next step, whether that be further education or employment... but are they really any more than a proof of students' studiousness? And could they be getting in the way of fostering the skills really needed to make it in the modern world?
Beaulieu teacher and Express columnist Rory Steel shares his thoughts on the matter...
“Rigour! It’s a word that former UK Education Minister Michael Gove turned into a six-letter swearword within the teaching community, but now the dust has settled, it pains me to say he had a point.
Gove tried to make education more ‘robust’ in the worst way possible, but – love it or hate it – his legacy remains. GCSEs are graded in numbers rather than letters, and A Levels have returned to ‘final’ exams – but why?
The perception was that it was – and is – possible to play the system. Teachers heard stories of schools that got year groups to learn and pass an IT GCSE… in just two weeks! While such stories are the exception rather than the rule, many teachers believe that ‘not all GCSEs are equal’. As a teacher of Maths, IT and Art, I know all sides of the argument. For the record, my art degree was far more demanding than my maths one – but that’s another story.
Pictured: Michael Gove MP, who infamously introduced a new numbers-based grading system during his time as Education Minister. (Policy Exchange)
Whether you buy into the premise or not, GCSEs now have a pecking order. Maths and English are worth double all other subjects in ‘Progress 8’ – the new schools comparison measure. Sciences and humanities follow closely behind, with Arts bringing up the rear. While I wholeheartedly disagree with the arts being sidelined, it highlights why schools are tempted to game the system. But is it really gaming, or just giving students the best chance in life?
A parent recently asked me about the iGCSE (international GCSE) – something gaining popularity as an internationally transferable qualification. Aside from course differences, the query related to the potential statistical advantage in getting a better grade. Therein lies the question: are grades or skills more important to parents?
Beaulieu sit both iGCSE and GCSEs separately for English Literature and Language, as it gives some students a better chance of getting that all-important C, while the GCSE’s rigour helps students better prepare for the demands of A Level essays. But if you’re a school finishing at 16, should you worry about that six-letter swearword? After all, grades are often the deciding factor in securing employment of applying for further education. We need to be careful that we don’t teach students “all about exams but little of the wider world,” as Secret Teacher states.
I’m being deliberately controversial here, but the premise remains.
The time to foster deeper skills beyond factual recall is being eroded. We don’t have as much time to let pupils fail, an important step in acquiring resilience and resourcefulness. We give them much of the information because we simply don’t have the time to let pupils find, distil and verify sources. In an effort to improve rigour, I fear we are losing independence.
Pictured: Exams teach students about factual recall, but they must also be equipped with skills, Rory argues.
Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk enthusiastically proclaims to the young and ambitious, “skills matter more than degrees”. He’s not a lone voice on this. Employers often complain of soft skills being lost and Generation Y’s lack of perseverance and independence. Whose fault is it? The teachers’, the students’, or government’s? My answer is always the same: the enemy is expectation, as there is simply not enough time in the day to do it all.
Teachers witness the inevitable repeating cycles of expectation. Skills, grades, skills, grades… ideally we want both, so let’s have both, but don’t keep changing the goal posts of expectation of each. If schools are told to improve results, it comes at a cost to skills and vice versa. Imagine a world where every year schools didn’t improve but they didn’t get worse either… Isn’t that the goal?
A statistician will tell you the averages work out. Some students will excel in education, others will not. We can’t make everyone get A*s, sorry, 9s now. We can give everyone the best chance, but that’s it.
Let’s start trusting schools - make us accountable, of course - but trust us. Stop comparing apples and pears and boiling our communities down to raw figures. These young people start as a fragile mix we hope to cultivate into wonderfully capable individuals, whether that’s architects or artists, mathematicians or musicians.
I don’t think we should bend over backwards to compare ourselves to the UK. Jersey should look after Jersey and tailor our education to its own needs. We want our young people to be successful on a global level, but we need to look more closely to home first. We have a huge wealth of global talent within a square mile in St. Helier, filled with international finance centres and law firms. Jersey can draw upon all of this for the benefit of our young people.
Pictured: Island students can draw upon skills bases closer to home to make them globally employable, Rory says.
I think that change is on the horizon, Skills Jersey and Digital Jersey are both recent examples of this mentality, which I hope continues, but until you can give schools more time, just trust that we work very hard to give thousands of unique young people every advantage we can to succeed.”
The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and not those of Bailiwick Express.
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