In 2021, I thought a lot about the misery of exams

Published on 12 December 2021

It’s the end of September 2021, and the new school year is well underway. Teachers and students are settling back into a tentative normality. Over the last 2 years, learning has been disrupted on a scale that nobody could have predicted. The havoc wreaked on the Class of Covid will be felt for a generation.

The school I teach at is tiny so I normally only have 4 students in each group which makes it very visible when absences are up. Today, all my lessons have ended up being one-to-ones. This morning, Mya and I went into depth about Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy on Christian theology, and I spent the afternoon introducing Ryan to Marxism. But despite a relatively calm day, I’m concerned. It’s clear the students (both those present and absent) haven’t recovered from the ordeal of the last school year. 

I’m packing up my classroom when the email from the Department for Education arrives.

Exams are back on.

I scroll to the FAQs. 

Q. Why are we bringing exams back?

A. Exams are the best and fairest form of assessment.

In 2020, all school exams were cancelled at the last minute due to covid school closures in the UK. And students weren’t expected to come back to school before the grades were due. Teachers had to award grades to their students, and there was no time for us to gather ‘evidence’ to support the grades we were giving, which meant that exam boards just had to trust teachers. 

But this year, that wasn’t the case. Exams were cancelled again but this time, teachers were told that they needed to provide substantial evidence to support the grades they’d awarded. Most schools had 6 weeks to gather and prepare it. 

My school was designed to counter all of those things that so many students struggle with in mainstream education. We only have 15 students, we don’t have detentions, or arbitrary rules, we teach by ability and interest rather than age groups. We rarely have conflict. Students and staff work together, eat together, and at lunch we play games together.

But even in this permissive environment, those 6 weeks of gathering and preparing evidence were hell. Students completed exam papers in every lesson in every subject, over and over. School turned into the exams factory it likes to pretend it isn’t.

After the summer half term, many of my students were too depressed, too burnt-out, to come back, hence the absences. And what was the point anyway? School had become a place to learn how to get good at taking exams, and not a place to fluidly follow interests. And besides, surely the exam boards knew what they needed to know about each student by this point: the evidence was in.

But the message from the Department for Education was clear: exams are the best and fairest form of assessment. But the students were miserable, so were the teachers, and the only thing anyone was learning was that the Department for Education was wrong.

To add insult to injury, the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, explained that teacher predictions would mean considerably higher grades, devaluing everyone’s results. So despite those soul-crushing 6 weeks, students are effectively being told that their efforts are not good enough.

But I know my students.

Even working in mainstream schools with classes of up to 39, I knew them well enough to know what they could do on a good day, and how they might slip up on a bad one. I have a good idea of what my GCSE students could achieve in an A-Level, what the A-Level students could do in higher education, or what level of job they would be able to handle. And I don’t believe that you can tell much about a person based on how they perform in one exam. If I was hiring someone, or taking them into my degree class, I would much rather have the word of someone who knows that person, than a string of out-of-context exam results. 

Gavin Williamson’s position implies that we can’t trust teachers. If teacher predictions mean that results will be higher, he must believe that the teachers are wrong. Dishonest even. And he’s not the only one. During the first lockdown, social media was rife with people accusing teachers of being too lazy to return to their jobs. There is a culture of mistrust surrounding the profession and exams are at the heart of it. Schools are measured on them. Teacher pay rises are based on them. And when exam results are given this much importance, of course a teacher’s judgement will not be trusted. 

I know that there are many people who will disagree with me. They believe that exams are the easiest and best way of ending a period of education and the best way of proving an education has been received. 

But here’s what I believe.

Without mandatory exams, students follow their interests, picking up literacy and numeracy in ways they relate to those interests. A 12-year-old who shows an aptitude for astronomy can pursue that interest to degree level if they want to. Students would not be forced to follow curriculums and their teachers are there as resources. Exam skills would be removed from the equation because the realities of the modern world is that we can look things up, ask for help, and share our knowledge. This would be encouraged at school. Admissions and recruitment wouldn’t be able to look at a string of grades, they will need to get to know a candidate, or listen to the adults who have known that young person for years.

I began writing this post when the government was still talking about post-pandemic exam reform. And for a shining moment, I believed that the tides might be turning. Maybe one day they will. But for now ‘best and fairest’ remains ‘easiest and cheapest’ and if the pandemic couldn’t shake that up, then what will?

1. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/12/system-determining-a-level-results-england-robust-fair/