The pens are new in the transparent pencil cases; the pencils sharp. They won’t stay that way. Many students will endure 30 hours of exams, spread over six weeks, all the way through the hay fever season, into flaming June. The pressure is tangible. The scribbling students have been harangued about these exams since Year 7. Or maybe even before then, when they toured the local secondary schools with their parents, for GCSEs are the public measure of schools. For state schools in particular, they are still the most important part of their reputation.

Since then, there have been many assemblies, reams of mock exams, and much money spent: an average school will have paid the examination boards about as much as a senior teacher’s salary just to get the papers marked. If their school is going through a process of improvement, there may have been even more: summer schools, bribes, gimmicks, posters in corridors, school heroes and villains. At the end of all this there will be results and tears and league tables. Parents will look at those as they chose a school, and then the whole cycle will start again.

But what will the pupils themselves get out of it? There will be learning, of course, in this intense communal effort and focus. But there will be considerable narrowing too. Many academy chains, despite the campaigning of Ofsted, still prefer to have students pick their GCSEs in Year 8, when they are 12 or 13, all the better to double down and narrow in. Within these subjects, new learning will have stopped last Christmas: since then, it’s all been revision. Despite all this, nearly a fifth of the students in the room will come away with Grade 4s, the lowest pass possible. Around 10% of them will get a 1 or 2, and they probably know it. Someone in the building will probably crack under all this: our exam system is surely one reason 15-year-olds have such poor mental health. 

Afterwards, there will be proms, hugs, shirt-signing, tears: the rites of passage of leaving. But they aren’t leaving. All of them, by law, are supposed to stay in education or training till they are 18. So what were the GCSEs for? Mostly, 16-year-olds are too busy to ask. Even the luckiest third, the ones who have taken the whole course at a decent canter, hopped over all the jumps with the minimum upset (good health and a supportive, consistent home are a vast help at GCSE), have no resits to do, a decent hand of 7-9s in a range of subjects, an eye on university and a place in their own school sixth form, are preoccupied. They have to choose their A Levels.

Another narrowing, a sudden one: from 11 limited subjects to 3 in academic depth. Here is a loss even for the most academic students: they must prefer sciences over arts, drop humanities or languages, decisions which affect their entire lives. And nothing to be done about it because in England there is no longer an intermediate Higher or AS level.

The student with 6 and 7s across the board, able in most things but specialising in none, good in school but not studying much at home, needs that intermediate level even more. None of the narrow, difficult A levels may really be for him; and there is no leeway to experiment. Disproportionately, such students come from non-middle-class homes. Annually, they make choices which sound practical but which will disadvantage them later: Law over French, Media Studies over History.

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Once chosen, many will find the A Level a leap. GCSE is an end point, it acts as a block to advanced learning. In languages, for example, teachers are under pressure to skip out blocks of grammar: the emphasis is on vocabulary; a pass can be had without it. English GCSE may be passed without independent reading of long texts, Biology without much Maths. But A Level will ask for skills in all these things, and established habits of study and a place to work too. Long hours of paid work and commutes take a toll on all that: it’s not surprising that the drop-out rate among disadvantaged students is nearly 15%. Nationally, fewer than half of our students end up with 2 A Levels.

None of this is anything, though, to the sufferings of that failing 35%. They will enter the underfunded, undervalued and confusing world of English vocational learning, often at a lower academic level than they have already attained. The courses available are truncated by the insistence of GCSE at 16. There are very many — EAL learners, disadvantaged students — who simply need a little more time to succeed at GCSE level. But a three-year course, say, in Electrical Engineering, with Higher Maths and GCSE English, all assessed in a single baccalaureate at 18, does not exist in England.

There are options like that in Germany. Across Europe, 16-year-olds are mostly a year or more into such courses, vocational or academic. Finns manage to move from school to technical or academic colleges at 16 on a minimal set of teacher assessments and standardised computer tests, and yet emerge much higher up the PISA rankings: better educated at nearly every level. Even the French, surely as obsessed with hierarchical education and competitive exams as any nation could be, only examine once, at 18. No other country sets a vast bank of exams two years before leaving school.

But other countries in Europe don’t wear acrylic blazers to school, either. The GCSE shares a mythic root. Once there were O Levels and CSEs, and grammar schools and secondary moderns, and gyms with wooden floors and hymns in assembly, and this, against all historical evidence, believe the Tory Party, the Daily Mail and my granny, was Better.

Though the Tories abolished the O Level, in fact. It went in 1987, just before Kenneth Baker’s Great Education Reform Bill, or Gerbil. GCSE joined up O Level and CSE: a qualification for everyone. Unfortunately, its invention coincided with those of the excel sheet, the internet, and the Gerbil’s worst innovation: competition between schools as policy. By 2013, a school’s pass rate at GCSE was being surveyed in a thousand public data sets and, inevitably, monstrously gamed. Coursework elements meanwhile were being destroyed by internet plagiarism, and the AS Level had been invented, turning the final three years of school into a maze of elaborate examinations. It would have been a fine moment to abolish the GCSEs and tackle the problem of vocational education. Michael Gove, the new Education Secretary, had the ambition and drive to do it.

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But Gove was also, and more profoundly, a populist. Instead, of abolition, he tried to make the GCSE as much like an O Level as possible, abolishing coursework, doubling down on handwriting and rote learning, and entrenching failure by introducing grading by proportion. Gavin Williamson had another excellent chance at major reform during the pandemic; sadly, he was far too dim. Nadim Zahawi is much cleverer, but his White Paper indicates little interest.

Why would it, and why would he? GCSE is such an entrenched part of school experience that people inside schools and out accept it like the weather. Deep reform of the sky will never be as popular as selling umbrellas. It would take a truly radical, dedicated politician to push it forward, and we’re short of those. It would help though, if the electorate could even think about a world without GCSE. Dear reader, can we start there? 

Where the bombs of the Luftwaffe failed, however, Covid-19 succeeded. As it became clear towards the end of March that schools would be closing, attention turned quickly to the cancellation of exams and the thorny question of how qualifications could be awarded without the traditional process. Administrative bodies across the four nations opted for a system of ‘centre assessed grades’, whereby schools submitted estimated grades for students in each subject. The exam boards have been subjecting these grades to a process of moderation to try to ensure a level of fairness in the outcomes and protect against grade inflation.

For a minority of committed progressive folk, this unprecedented situation provided the glimpse of an opportunity. If a teacher-assessed system could be shown to be effective, it could hammer the death nail for the examination-based approach that they view as archaic and oppressive. As Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian in May “There are some blessings to Covid-19, and one may yet be to liberate education from the dictatorship of ‘the test’’. The idea that exams are a constricting distraction that obscure the joy of learning has been the focus of recent research which recommends teacher assessment in both the UK and the US.

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It would appear that the teacher-assessed model is, however, dying before it has had the chance to be born. The moderation process that was employed in Scotland by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to compensate for apparent grade inflation by schools led to the downgrading of students and affected most those in deprived areas. Following accusations of unfairness and the risk of numerous appeals and contestations, Education Secretary John Swinney yesterday announced that downgraded students would have their results revoked and replaced by the raw teacher-given grades.

Seemingly panicked by this, in a last-minute policy shift, the DfE has announced that downgraded students in England would be able to use previous mock exam results if they exceeded the grade awarded by the exam boards. This eleventh-hour move has been chaotic for schools and its logic has been heavily criticised by school leaders. It is no surprise that exams will be back in October; the sooner the better as far as the authorities are concerned.

Many of the criticisms levelled at exams as a framework for learning and a means of assessment have validity. There have been valiant attempts over the years to provide a balance between formal assessment and coursework-based, teacher-assessed learning, and this trend rightly continues in many vocational and technical courses. However, despite their drawbacks, exams do encourage and promote a much wider set of skills and values than is often acknowledged by their child-centred opponents. And these qualities appear to be important to both students and their parents. Preparing for exams requires prioritisation and planning skills, emotional resilience, self-reliance and discipline. Succeeding in an exam environment requires a cool head under pressure, determination and persistence. And above all, the acquisition and retention of knowledge is viewed as of paramount importance.

What is obvious and striking about these skills and values, is the extent to which they scream social conservatism. It is not hard to see why some progressives may recoil at this system. It hardly seems focused around the values of creativity and individuality that they view as central to their identity. The 2015 British Election Study demonstrated that conservatives were more likely to prioritise attitudes and behaviours within the overall value umbrella of ‘conscientiousness’, which seem a perfect fit for an exam-based education system. Progressives tend to value ‘openness’ which is linked to creativity, and are more prone to ‘neuroticism’ and ‘emotional instability’. It’s not hard to see why the exam hall might be educational kryptonite for them.

So here’s the paradox. Exams seem to fit the bill of a hot culture war issue, particularly in these febrile times. And yet when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings set about reforming GCSE and A Level qualifications from the Department of Education in 2011, there was little more than a grumble. Opposition seemed to be more focused on the precise content of the History and English curriculum, than the fact that project-based, teacher-assessed components had been reduced to an afterthought. Exams were front and centre again, and more demanding and stress-inducing than before, but there was seemingly very little desire among the most avowedly progressive members of society to seriously challenge the method of our assessment system. Why this is the case is worth some consideration.

To my mind, the answer to this conundrum lies in two places. The first is with a shared concept of justice. Having worked in examinations for a number of years, I have heard exams derided and disparaged in many different ways. They are ‘cruel’, ‘damaging’, ‘joyless’ and ‘tedious’. But I have rarely heard exams called ‘unfair’. Exams provide an impartial and independent judgement on the performance of each student.

Conservatives and indeed many liberals favour them because they appear to conform to a meritocratic standard, and are not prone to corruption or cronyism. Maybe the scope of what they test is limited, but no system is perfect. For progressives, a teacher-assessed system may be more just in egalitarian terms and more inclusive because it does not prioritise such a particular set of skills. Convincing the majority of people that it is robustly meritocratic, would, however, be a huge uphill struggle.

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Here the Scottish affair is instructive. Despite its apparent bungling of the matter, SQA was aiming at fairness by trying to bring 2020 attainment into line with previous years. It’s clear that it is not an easy job to create an algorithm that would be rigorously meritocratic in this situation. But one of the reasons formal exams are seen as fair, and many feel the SQA approach was unjust is because the exam system treats each candidate as an individual. There is something morally cold about the collectivism of a general, aggregate moderation process. As Stephen Bush pointed out succinctly “government forgetting life not lived in the aggregate. In aggregate, yes, moderated results are more ‘fair’. But that’s not how it feels to anyone…whose results are downgraded.”

A somewhat more cynical possibility is that there is a second, less noble reason that exams get an easy ride. Those who would be most likely to challenge them on the basis of a more progressive view of education often have little material incentive to do so. There is a reason why constitutional theorist Vernon Bogdanor has labelled the progressive middle-classes the “exam-passing classes“. The writer Nassim Taleb puts it less generously but more colourfully in his most recent book, Skin In The Game, when he talks about the “Intellectual Yet Idiot” who ‘can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island…their main skill is to pass exams written by people like them’. In other words, exams provide a veneer of meritocratic justice which is useful to those who benefit from them materially the most.

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It is not unusual in the Anglosphere for the progressively-minded to quietly practise values and lifestyles that are very different to what they preach, as Ed West argued in UnHerd. “Think progressive, live conservative” or “social liberalism for thee but not for me” is a common hypocrisy. In their approach to their children’s education and accomplishments, progressive middle-class parents often employ a Hobbesian ethic whereby stability and security are viewed as the indispensable precondition of individual flourishing. Exams provide a good structure for this via the socially conservative norms and behaviours they promote. They also have the added bonus that they can be justified to oneself in moral terms, in a way that coursework and teacher-assessed systems can’t. A well-defined meritocratic framework allows those at the top to believe that they are deserving of their success, while viewing those at the bottom with less sympathy. Progressive valorisation of child-centred learning and pedagogical experimentation then becomes something that is largely for show, a way of acquiring status among the in-group.

In the end it appears that exams are going to survive Covid-19 relatively unscathed, as they have survived threats in the past. Our commitment to exams appears unshakeable. This is partly because, as Winston Churchill said of democracy, they are the worst form of assessment apart from all the others. But it is also because those who, given this unique opportunity, might have been expected to challenge the status quo hardest are also those who are wisest to its benefits.