Exams!

It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I wrote a blog about mock exams¹. Many schools now have multiple mock phases, some even starting in year 10, but now, finally, with the actual GCSE exams in full swing, the end is here.

Sounds ominous doesn’t it? The end is here. The end is nigh. The end is nowhere near, to be honest, it’s just a bunch of exams. Sure, the exams may well decide what you do next, but they absolutely, 100%, do not define the rest of your life.

This week, this is mostly for students and parents, but is also me trying to sort out how I feel about terminal exams². I was always ok at exams, because I’ve got a good memory and it seems to me that’s all exams actually test. I have O levels³ in Maths and Further Maths, A levels in just about every area of maths, have a maths degree and taught maths but I think I only truly understood how it all fitted together after around ten years of teaching it. There is definitely an argument that it is my fault I didn’t see the connections, or perhaps my teachers for not pointing it out, but that avoids the simple truth: the exams did not teach me to understand maths. They taught me to regurgitate information.

Is this what we want?

Schools are sometimes rightly criticised as being exam factories, and not preparing students for the reality of the world of work. I agree with the first point but not the second. We can teach resilience, the power of hard work and so on, but preparing for the world of work? Nah, that’s not on us. The average British person changes jobs every 5 years, and 1 in 10 of us has changed career in the last ten years⁴. Four million people changed career after COVID. How are we supposed to prepare students for that? Prepare them for a world where their job might not exist or at the very least will be fundamentally changed by AI? All we can do is present a fair and balanced curriculum, and teach them how to learn so that they can be prepared for whatever life throws at them.

Do we do that? No, I don’t think we do. Can we prepare students for the continually shifting job market? Not without a crystal ball. Hell, we didn’t even have email in my first school. Parents have a part to play in ensuring their children are ready for the job market – simple things like punctuality, attendance and politeness would be a start – but I blogged about that last week, so let’s keep this focused on teachers this week. Well, and those in charge of education⁵.

The charity Young Minds has looked at the effects of exams on young people⁶. The statistics are horrifying. 15% of young people have stopped attending school due to the pressure of exams. 13% have suicidal thoughts. 10 and 11 year olds lose sleep due to SATS exams.

This is insane. SATS are putting year 6 students under so much pressure they can’t sleep? How exactly does that foster a love of learning? Many students think the point of school is to pass exams. It is not, nor should it be. It should be about learning – both how to learn, and why to learn. As far as I can see, exams don’t help anyone love to learn, yet surely our jobs as teachers are to encourage and foster joy in the act of learning something new⁷?

We have definitely lost that somewhere along the way.

There’s a great cartoon about exams:

Why should we all be judged on our ability to remember things? Remember facts? Our current curriculum hits an unhappy middle ground between problem solving and remembering things. Now, I do think we should have to remember some facts, but problem solving is a far more vital skill. Adaptability and an ability to apply what you have learned are far more important than simply recalling facts. You shouldn’t fail a question because you can’t remember the formula for the volume of a sphere⁸.

I’m not for a second suggesting that recall isn’t important, because of course it is – but should it decide your grade? Your future? Isn’t being able to solve the problem a more desirable skill? Also, by ‘the problem’ it should be something they might actually need to do in real life⁹, especially if we are talking GCSE and beyond.

So how should we assess students? How should we check they are learning things? There aren’t many easy answers here, especially if we continue the flawed folly of league tables. Some form of continuous assessment is probably better – as long as they are low stakes so they’re checking for learning and understanding and happen in a familiar setting so students can show what they can do. A strange comparison. Expecting students to perform at a level that is decided when they are 11, is crazy¹⁰. No-one – and I really mean no-one – learns and performs in a nice linear way, and yet this is exactly how GCSE target grades are decided. This leads to determining whether students are selected for intervention groups, or to be pushed into higher groups, and yep, it leads to some falling between the cracks.

Back to 11 year olds exhibiting signs of stress.

Stress does funny things to people. It makes me very short tempered, angry and I struggle to sleep, for example, but I know otherwise ‘tough’ or ‘happy go lucky’ people that become unable to leave the house or just sit in the corner and cry. Why are we creating a system that makes children stressed? What the fuck? How on Earth does that help anyone?

We really need a root and branch reform¹¹ of the way we assess our students at all levels.

But for now, for any students reading this¹², just remember, the exams are not the final step on the road of the rest of your life. They are the first. It’s up to you if you want to let it define you.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Here! It’s mock time! – David Watkins ↩︎
2. So even more of a rambling mess than usual. Yay! ↩︎
3. Yes, I’m that old. If that surprises you, bless you, I owe you a drink of your choice. If it doesn’t, then that’s what 32 years of teaching in the State sector does to you. Also, fuck you. ↩︎
4. Employee Retention Statistics [Updated For 2025!] – Acuity Training ↩︎
5. And we have much to do there, given the large number of people who seem to have believed that last week’s council elections meant we have a new government. Or the people who voted a council member in because they will ‘stop the boats’. Is that before or after you’ve sorted out the potholes and the bin collection in land-locked Newcastle Under Lyme? ↩︎
6. Suicidal thoughts and self-harm – young people sitting GCSEs and A Levels reveal the harm caused by high pressure exams ↩︎
7. And yet, at the moment, the right-wing press are obsessed with ‘leftie’ teachers brainwashing kids. Firstly, teachers cover the entire political spectrum, and secondly, we can’t get kids to be quiet and do homework, so how the hell are we brainwashing them? ↩︎
8. 4/3 π r³ fact fans. ↩︎
9. And not, as frequent GCSE Maths questions are, about someone taking socks out of a drawer at random, replacing it, then calculating the probability of what just happened. Guess that person doesn’t have a TV. ↩︎
10. This is what currently happens with targets for GCSE students in the UK. Their SATS results are fed into an algorithm and out comes what they should do at GCSE. Nuts! ↩︎
11. But not Reform. Those fuckers can get in the bin. ↩︎
12. Why? You crazy fools. You should be revising. ↩︎