17
Examination of Witnesses
Sarah Fletcher, Matthew Glanville and Alistair McConville.
Q119 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to this session of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee. Welcome back, in the case of Sarah Fletcher. It is great to have you again with us. Thank you very much. As before, a transcript of the meeting will be taken and will be available for correction, should that be necessary. I would like to ask you each to quickly introduce yourselves, with just a line or so to say who you are and what your organisation is.
Sarah Fletcher: I am the high mistress, the head, at St Paul’s Girls’ School. I have taught and led numbers of schools abroad and at home, in the state sector as well as in the independent sector. I have always had a huge interest in educational reform and was particularly involved in the creation of the extended project qualification.
Alistair McConville: I am deputy head at King Alfred School, but also the co-founder of Rethinking Assessment, which is an organisation that is campaigning for assessment reform. It is not only campaigning but trying to show practical solutions to those problems. I have been a teacher of philosophy and religious studies in various independent schools—Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Latymer Upper School, Bedales and now King Alfred School.
Matthew Glanville: I am the director for assessment at the IB, an international education organisation dealing with ages three to 18. Our middle years programme is the one that is particularly pertinent today.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: I apologise to the committee, but I need to put something on the record. At the Ofsted meeting, I blamed Ofsted for the fact that, at my daughter’s school, Ofsted arrived, the teachers were all geared up and Ofsted never talked to them at all. Amanda Spielman has now told me that that particular Ofsted inspection was concerned only with the procedures and paperwork of the senior staff, and she had told the senior staff that, but it was the senior staff who said to the teachers, “Come on. Ofsted’s coming. You’ve got to gear up”. So can I now apologise to Ofsted? On this occasion, it was not its fault, but the fault of the senior staff of the school.
Q120 The Chair: Thank you. That is noted. I would like to kick off, please, with a question about GCSEs. In your view, are they fit for purpose, and how do the alternative key stage 4 qualifications that you offer differ from and/or complement them?
Sarah Fletcher: That is quite a big question. I do not think they are fit for purpose. It is interesting that they were introduced before the world wide web and before any school had computers. They were, therefore, looking at a different environment. We are working in a very different world now, and it is important that our qualifications be forward looking and give young people the skills they need for the modern world.
To me, GCSEs are what I call closed-box assessments. The information is given, and pretty much the answers that you are expected to give are given, because we need to be sure that answers are fair and easily moderated. Therefore, mark schemes, certainly latterly, have become a lot narrower; students who display creativity and independence tend to find that those efforts are not rewarded, and they are possibly even penalised for that.
In a nutshell, the skills that we need young people to have for the modern world are not being developed in this type of examination. Typically, these exams are a terminal assessment at the end of the two-year course. They are in an exam room, solitary, and about memorisation. Although other skills are developed along the route, such as critical thinking, source analysis and understanding of quite difficult concepts, I would argue that the rigour of that kind of mental application is a lot less, because it is overweighted by the quantity of information you have to learn and the mode in which you have to recall and show your understanding, as in the terminal examination.
This is, ultimately, inequitable. Certainly post Covid, we have seen an increase in the number of students presenting as neurodiverse and asking for additional time and extra consideration in the exam room. As soon as you start seeing that grow to the extent that we have, you begin to understand that that terminal assessment is really not playing to the strengths of a significant number of our students.
Also, we are not preparing them for the world in which they will work. It is not just the world of work, but universities, which are increasingly asking students to do presentations, teamwork, collaborative open book assessments, computerised assessments and authentic assessments, which grapple with complex problems. That is not what the GCSEs are training our young people to do, and so, going to university or into the workplace, they are not well equipped.
It is also a bigger issue than that. For me, it is about mental well-being and empowerment. The world is complicated and complex, and increasingly so, and young people need to have the critical faculties to understand that they too can change their environment, whether it is their own personal environment or engaging on a larger scale with the issues that are facing us. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to give them an education that enables them to do that. That does not mean an education that basically results in memorisation of a lot of information.
Our GCSEs and our discourse around education have promoted a very academic route between 14 and 16, and this has narrowed options for numbers of students for whom that is not their preferred way of working, and they do not see their ambitions lying in that direction. The creative and performing arts and technology have suffered significantly as a result, and it is time that we understood that all those things bring skills aplenty, and really important life skills at that, to young people, and that we rebalance the way we look at 14-16 education.
GCSEs impose stress. We know that the marking at the end of the period, with all the best intentions of every exam board, with strong moderation, can be variable. As Ofqual has said, a mark can be reliable to one grade either way, particularly in the more subjective subjects, the humanities, and yet we are using those marks as precise indicators of a student’s abilities. I would argue that that is unfair on two grounds. First, we know that they are not precise and, secondly, they are assessing only a very narrow range of those skills. We need to give young people the opportunity to show what they can do and how those skills will map on a much more successful future.
Finally, we also know that a third of all young people fail to get level 4 in English and maths, which really limits their life chances. I have to question not the young people but the system that enables that to happen.
The Chair: We will come back to some of the alternatives a bit later on in the session, so I will press on and ask our other two panellists to comment on whether GCSEs are fit for purpose.
Alistair McConville: I would agree with everything that Sarah said about purpose and just pick up on that last point about a third failing. It was rather extraordinary to see Rishi Sunak bemoaning that fact recently without an apparent awareness that the system requires a third of people to fail every time. It is not possible for every child to pass their maths and English GCSE at age 16 because of the bell curve and the norm referencing that happens, so that was a bit alarming. If the purpose is to have everyone leave with a credible qualification about literacy and numeracy, they are certainly not.
The Chair: Can I ask you to clarify your point about norm referencing and why a third have to fail, or have to get a 4 or below, in the system?
Alistair McConville: I am not a statistician, but there is a bell curve on to which a distribution of grades has to be fitted every year. Essentially, there is an allowance of grade 9s and grade 6s, and that bell curve is required to look roughly the same every year. A third of people necessarily fall into the bottom third that are designated as failures. Officially, the exam boards would say, “That’s a pass. A 1, 2 or 3 is a pass”, but the Government define anything below a 4 as not a pass. A good pass is a 5, but the system requires a third of people to fail. Rather than using criterion referencing, which is more like a driving test where as many people as can demonstrate adequate competence will pass, there is an allowance of people who are allowed to pass.
Matthew Glanville: I would invite the committee to ask exactly that question of Ofqual, because my understanding is that the GCSEs are based on a weak criterion referencing approach. I recognise some of the outcomes of what you are saying, but it perhaps is not quite as stark as that in the approach used. Again, I am a representative of the IB, so it is more appropriate that the regulator explains exactly how that system works.
Alistair McConville: You are right that there is a criterion referencing mini-moment where samples are compared to ensure that the bell curve roughly maps on to the standards of last year’s bell curve, but by far the overriding factor is getting this standard distribution of X numbers of grades. You could not suddenly have a great year when only 10% of people failed their English and maths. That is not possible because of the requirement to have the bell curve year on year.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie: Can I ask why the bell curve is even necessary? What is the purpose of it?
Alistair McConville: I am sure the answer would be that it is to ensure comparability year on year and to ensure that there is not grade inflation, essentially.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Ofqual receives a remit from the Secretary of State, and my understanding is that grade inflation is a substantial part of that remit, but we can ask Ofqual about that.
The Chair: Aside from the problem of sorting too many people into that category of failing because of the bell curve, did you have any general reflections about whether GCSEs are fit for purpose?
Alistair McConville: If you take a more positive definition of the purpose of education and try to be more holistic in what you say education is for—at my last school, for example, we talked about head, hand and heart to try to demonstrate the roundedness of development that we wanted education to deliver—then, no, it fails. It offers only one small part of a rounded education.
The GCSE experience is very head-focused in those terms. Particularly if you have a standard nine or 10-GCSE experience it is all about head knowledge and leaves very little time for the development of other important elements of an education, such as crucial skills that will help people succeed at the next level, which Sarah has alluded to. At my current school, King Alfred, we talk about the need to develop communication, collaboration and creative thinking skills. There is an opportunity cost to spending all your time on knowledge and understanding, leaving very little time to develop the broad character measures that we know matter so much.
In a balanced wheel of education, you might have the knowledge and understanding bit, the character bit and the skills bit, but the number of GCSEs that are required in an ordinary school is so large that there is simply not the space to do all the things that we would like our children to be doing and to be recognised and have validation for. It is one very narrow bit of what an education should be, and it is assessed in a way that is not really fair, because some people are good at those sorts of demonstrations of knowledge and understanding, and others would do far better if they were able to explain orally, for example, that they have understood something about a great work of literature. How exam-focused it is, particularly since the 2015 reforms, has made it a very narrow opportunity to demonstrate even the thing that it is all about, which is knowledge and understanding.
Matthew Glanville: What the IB attempts to do is very similar to what we have heard described. MYP is one of the alternatives to GCSEs that you have spoken about. It is that effort to focus on the conceptual understanding, giving those students the chance to show their thinking skills in unfamiliar situations, the interdisciplinary element and the creative problem-solving element.
We have an assessment moment for each student at the end of the MYP. For several of those subjects, that is through a digital assessment. For others, it is through an e-portfolio approach, depending on whether the approach is right. A key part of the middle years programme is a personal project, where the student has a chance to develop something that is personal to them, and the IB reviews that. That gives you an idea of some of the other options that are possible.
To your specific question, the GCSE assessments are broadly delivering on what they are being asked to deliver on. It is important to look at the whole-system educational context to understand why GCSEs are behaving in the way they do.
Q121 Lord Knight of Weymouth: It is credible to argue that GCSEs examine the national curriculum, which runs to 16. Therefore, you can have an argument with the curriculum rather than with the GCSEs, which are doing the job they have been asked to do. Should we have exams at 16? At St Paul’s, you have GCSEs and IGCSEs, which you choose to do. At King Alfred’s you do the same, as you did at Bedales. You have the MYP, which gives way to the diploma programme at 16. You all choose to have exams at 16, yet many jurisdictions do not, so why should we, when we no longer allow people to leave school altogether at 16, examine at 16?
Matthew Glanville: You raise a really good point. The MYP exams are optional, for exactly that reason: they are there for the schools that wish to have them, but it is quite possible to finish the curriculum without doing anything other than the personal project exercise, which is a requirement, because we think the process of doing that really helps a student to understand and develop. It is also a bit of a celebration when they reach 16.
It is a really good question. In the UK system, those grades are deeply embedded at the moment, which is why the MYP serves that need. If that information is not required, or if this could be done better by informing the student rather than the system about that student’s strengths and weaknesses, which would then go to alternative ways of measuring it, that could be a really interesting approach to look at.
Alistair McConville: I do not think that exams have any kind of intrinsic evil in them at that point. There needs to be assessment all the way through a student’s career to tell them how they are doing and what they need to do better. The real problem is the number of exams all happening within a tiny window, the stakes that are attached to that very large number of exams, and the fact that it is only exams that tell us how a student is supposedly doing.
It is entirely reasonable to have some examination if the stakes are proportionate and if there are other balancing sources of information to tell people how students are doing. Students tell us that sitting 30 or so exams in June is an incredibly stressful experience at a time of their maximally sensitive development as adolescents. Their brains are all over the place. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology at Cambridge, is really clear that we are doing something to young people that is time and development-inappropriate. They are saying, “This is harming us. This is why we are among the unhappiest adolescents in the developed world and why there is this epidemic of teenage anxiety”. At a self-reported level, this is the thing we are doing to them that is really problematic.
Sarah Fletcher: I agree a lot with what Al has said. We need to be careful about what the word “exam” means. If we define it simply as sitting solo at a desk and writing, as it currently stands, we need to rethink it. However, if we are looking at assessment as a broader piece, a lighter-touch assessment at 16-plus is perfectly reasonable.
We also need to have a look at the purpose of assessment. Most assessment should be for the student and should be around touchpoints as to how well they are doing, encouragement to do things differently and better, and rewarding what they have done really well.
I also understand that there needs to be accountability. We need to be careful that we define assessment in different ways and do not necessarily make all the assessment the same. Currently, for example, all assessment is used as an accountability measure for schools, Progress 8. That means to say that every bit is what I might call high-stakes assessment. There is every merit in looking at how we can assess differently so that we are mixing the varieties and making it much more student focused.
Q122 Lord Baker of Dorking: I agree with everything that you have said. The case against GCSEs is formidable, but we must have an effective alternative. You talk of assessment. Presumably that would start in the primary school and a record would be built up over the years as they go from primary into secondary up to 16. Would it be necessary for that assessment to have maybe written tests at a school level in English and maths? The two basic skills of writing and reading have to be tested effectively at some stage. How would you achieve that? Would you go along with that sort of idea?
All the things you have said about recording a child’s record are absolutely right. We have used AI already in the assessment of children taking technical work in our colleges, and we find it as accurate as the teachers, if I may say, and better because it also provides student prompts. I would like your idea as to where there should be some sort of written test, not at a national level but at the school, in basic literacy and numeracy.
Sarah Fletcher: I would probably add digital literacy to that, but I agree entirely.
Alistair McConville: I agree that there needs to be evidence of achievement, which may or may not be achieved by a silent test, or it could just be accumulated classwork or a portfolio. There certainly needs to be evidence of the development of literacy and numeracy.
Matthew Glanville: The skills that you described are well assessed in an exam context, but there is also verbal communication, which would need to be assessed in a different way.
Q123 Lord Storey: Like Lord Baker, I agree with what you have been saying, but I have a challenge. During the pandemic, we saw teacher assessment that led to inflation of grades. On non-exam assessments, how do we ensure reliability and that it is the pupil’s own work? My wife was a secondary teacher and, at the time, it was sometimes just a tick-box exercise to make sure that that pupil got the grade the school wanted them to get, so that they got a good result at the end, which could go into their prospectus, et cetera. How do we ensure that parents and employers have confidence in a continual assessment approach as opposed to formal written exams?
Matthew Glanville: We can ensure that teacher marks are consistent across schools through the moderation process. That is the way the IB currently deals with the coursework elements we have. It is about selecting a random element from the teacher’s marking and making sure that our examiners agree with the marks that the teacher has given and the reasons why. That can be done.
The academic integrity issue is a very interesting one. The people who are best placed to understand whether it is the student’s own work are, of course, the teachers. If we have a system whereby the pressure on the teacher is not to maximise the student’s grade but to represent the result accurately, that can work. We can also do it with the way in which we select the questions. The “why” questions in an assessment are much harder for a student to get somebody or something else to do, rather than just doing it themselves.
Lord Storey: Would that mean we would have to remove some of the other pressures that schools and teachers face to ensure that we get a reliable assessment?
Matthew Glanville: There is certainly a real tension at the moment in the role of teachers. Is it to maximise the student’s performance, to maximise the school’s performance, or to be the guardian of a high-quality education?
Alistair McConville: On the teacher assessment experience, it is important to be clear that that was not comparing apples with apples, because the requirement for that standardisation process, whereby everything is fitted on to a bell curve, was removed during that period. So what you had was teachers’ best judgments about a child’s best performance, not on a given day. In a way, there was an inbuilt optimism to it that removed the possibility of kids having a shocking day on an exam.
It is not that teachers inflated grades; it was a different system. When Ofqual went to do its own moderation of schools to see whether these things had been reasonably applied, it made very few changes indeed. Its scrutiny of the teacher assessments, given the slightly different system under which teachers were operating, essentially said, “You’ve got this right”. It was as though we had moved to a criterion-based system from a norm-based system, and that enabled many students to do better, which is a good thing.
Teachers were not prepared for that experience. Training was not given for that assessment. Those of us who see a lot of merit in training teachers up to do good and reliable teacher assessment would say that that was not a totally fair set of evidence to use to compare. Therefore, “grade inflation” is not the right term for that. It was a different system.
To go back to how you ensure reliability in a teacher assessment world, there are good systems where you would have school-to-school moderation processes to support one another in arriving at the right sorts of judgments. I agree that teachers deserve to be trusted. They are professionals. If the stakes are not unreasonable around this stuff, you do not create the scenario in which people are much more likely psychologically to game the system. There is an interplay between the stakes around this stuff for individual teachers and for schools, which relates to accountability measures, and their ability to do their job professionally without undue pressures on them.
Sarah Fletcher: It depends on the task that you are setting the student and how you phrase your questions. The extended project qualification, for example, rewards the process more than the outcome. This is important for reliability and for deep-thinking skills. The EPQ insists that the student has a literature log. They have to log their thought processes. They have to comment on how a particular piece of evidence has altered their way of thinking and how it has potentially impacted the way they framed their own question. Therefore, when they produce the final piece, there is a huge amount of evidence that shows that they have put the work into it and not somebody else. The extended project qualification also comes hand in hand with a presentation, and I would find it very difficult for a student to plagiarise and then stand up and present convincingly in front of quite a critical crew of their own peers and other members of staff.
Our school-directed art course is another example. We teach a module on history of art. The students then have to write a piece of coursework that is to do with a chosen element. The framing of the question is the important point here. Earlier in the course, they will have done various assessed pieces of practical work that are personal, so when they come to write their essay about history of art it is about how their personal projects fit in to the context and the analysis of art history. I would defy any ChatGPT to be able to replicate something that is quite so personal.
Lord Storey: If you are a student whose first language is not English, you are immediately at a disadvantage, particularly if you live in a deprived community and are struggling to make ends meet.
Sarah Fletcher: No, not necessarily, because the extended project approach does not necessarily rely upon a written answer. You can produce all sorts of things. You can produce an object. You can create something. You can put on a play.
To continue on how you ensure reliability, as a teacher you will have given the students time in class to complete their assignment. You have not said, “Go away and do it”. In class, you are acting as a mentor and a guide. You are scaffolding the pupil and helping them, but you are also seeing their thought processes and marking that. Most of the marks are not for the end product but the process, and that is really important.
Q124 Lord Baker of Dorking: I should have declared an interest. I am also a member of Rethinking Assessment. Alistair, I am very impressed with the group that is working on research. They now have lots of experiments going on in all sorts of different schools across the country. What is emerging from those? Will you be able to develop an emerging example that deals with the questions that concern other people, the overoptimism of teachers and things of this sort? How can it be standardised reasonably over the country?
Alistair McConville: Rethinking Assessment is working on a number of things. I will mention one or two of them. Our overarching solution to the problem is a digital learner portfolio, which is a way of capturing a broad range of evidence of achievements, some of which might be standardised achievements similar to current GCSEs. This is also a way of capturing other kinds of achievements that are assessed in different ways. School-directed courses, for example, could sit within a digital learner portfolio. They will inevitably vary from one another in the way they are assessed and are standardised, but you can provide information about the way that process happens for that channel of learning.
For us, the solution is to have a mixture of different types of evidence, some of which might be highly standardised and of interest to certain audiences, which want to know that it is utterly reliable and comparable to every other school in the country, as with English and maths GCSE perhaps. I recognise that this other sphere of learning, which enables them to develop broader skills that are difficult to standardise but are really important for them to be engaging in, has a different level of comparability. Some of the workstreams in Rethinking Assessment are about developing reliable criteria for demonstrations of creativity or communication. There are well-researched models for what good oral communication looks like, which Voice 21 has done a lot on. Within this broad capture of a student’s overall experience and achievements, you would have written exam results, for those for whom that was interesting, as well as evidence of good speaking, which you can scale.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Yes, communication.
Alistair McConville: Absolutely.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Would the student be able to access that and add to it if they wanted to?
Alistair McConville: Yes. In our vision, this is a cumulative thing. It does not simply have to be handed in when you are 16. You build it up and curate it over time. It is validated externally as you go along and can be taken beyond school. Essentially, it is akin to but not the same as the very good notion of the record of achievement from all those years ago, but with all the advantages that technology now confers on us to make that adaptable, reliable and filterable for different audiences.
Q125 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I have been interested for some time in the Bedales assessed qualifications, but you are all innovators in this area. What are the barriers to alternative assessments being adopted by a large number of state-maintained, state-funded schools in particular at key stage 4, and how could we overcome them?
Sarah Fletcher: Progress 8 is a huge barrier to schools being able to do courses on their own. The other thing relates to university protocols and the feeling that you have to serve up a certain number of GCSEs and A-levels in order to fulfil that process. There are also issues to do with teacher workload, teacher training, and time and resources, and we have already had allusion to that. There are ways of overcoming all those things, but they are significant barriers that we need to think about.
I also come back to the issue of confidence in grading, which we have talked about. It is important that when we are looking at how to reform this system, we keep that really clear in our minds. Whatever we do has to have the confidence of parents, students, universities and employers. There are a whole number of constituent groups that this has to resonate with if we are to succeed.
I recommend that we create a system where we have assessment in different forms and that we accept that there are different levels of reliability. Where we have school-directed courses they must be externally moderated, as all of ours are. There are ways of doing that better. There are ways of engaging with universities and with employers on how we do this. There is also an enormous opportunity to get schools to work together in consortia, which would be hugely beneficial in sharing good practice, ideas and resources, as well as in moderating each other’s work.
The exam boards should play a role in this as well. Whatever courses we adopt, I would like to see a baccalaureate, rather like the IB middle years programme, where you have your national curriculum on the one hand, and on the other you have your modes of assessment and the skills associated with them. As Al points out, there are ways you can assess communication and critical thinking in the logs and the other bits of evidence that you are asking students to produce.
The exam boards are then part of a process, picking out bits of work to moderate in order to make sure that the consortia and the individual schools are sticking to the overarching rubric. Schools then have the opportunity to put together the national curriculum, potentially in a cross-curricular, interdisciplinary way, or in a much more subject-specific way, depending on their own students and their own approaches. This would free up the system, provided you also have a core of standard assessment, which all schools do, which plays to the point about English, maths and potentially digital skills. It is crucial that these assessments should be delivered, examined and assessed in a way that, again, holds the utmost public confidence.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: You mentioned the university protocols. From the conversations you have had with the universities as you have developed your own qualifications and assessments, do you get the sense that they respect the content that is assessed in GCSEs and then in A-levels, or do they just really like fact that it does their admissions job for them in selecting people?
Sarah Fletcher: That will vary according to subject. Your sciences and maths may well have a different answer to your humanities subjects. At GCSE, that is more of a moot point. At A-level, perhaps that matters rather more. Particularly if you are looking at geography, history or all of the humanities, I do not think that it really matters what content you study. It is your mindset; the way you analyse material and the way you think matter far more than a particular canon.
Alistair McConville: Perhaps I should start by saying what the School Directed Courses Consortium is and then a tiny bit about why it might be difficult for some schools to do it. This is a consortium of schools that are either already running their own GCSE alternatives—St Paul’s Girl’s, Bedales, King Alfred School and others—and schools that would really like to get into that world. Some have already committed to doing it and others have not yet committed because of the barriers. The group exists for us to support one another, and, for those of us who are more experienced, to help those who want to do it in taking that first step towards the development of their own courses.
The barriers for schools that would desperately love to do this are, as Sarah says, primarily Progress 8 and EBacc measures. They have concerns about being judged negatively by Ofsted for doing something a little offbeat, as well as concerns about teacher expertise, because teachers are now very good at delivering their GCSEs, but that is not the same as developing their own curriculum and applying new assessment methodologies.
Very frequently, you will have highly enthusiastic senior management teams and highly wary heads of department who are saying, “Hang on a minute. That sounds like a heck of a lot of work”—not that they are afraid of lots of work, but they already have lots of work—“so how are you going to help us get there?” The consortium exists to smooth the way for them to do that, so there is a possibility that we could do joint course design. We are already freely sharing the materials that we have for our courses with anyone who wants to look at that stuff, so that they could pick it up and do it.
Then there are the barriers of external audiences such as parents, who are often the most conservative, as are the students themselves sometimes, about doing something new-fangled; they do not always want to be the guinea pigs.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: I am glad you have raised that question about parents and an interesting quote that they are “often the most conservative”—with a small C, I assume. What are the arguments that shift them?
Sarah Fletcher: They are very shiftable. When I speak to parents, they understand that students need certain tokens of exchange, which is what I call the GCSEs and the A-levels, to do their course at university and are very anxious that these should be in place. They are also very aware that the world has changed, and that GCSEs are inappropriate. There are no two ways about that. When I talk to them about what I am saying here and generally about my attitude towards these things, there is almost universal support.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: So they would have an appetite for a different token of exchange.
Sarah Fletcher: Yes, very much so, but that is not simple. I have spoken in many other environments, including when I was head at City boys’, to lots of academy heads. They had exactly the same response: the parents know that the world has changed, but also that they have to have these exams because they have to.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: That is very helpful. Matthew, I am interested in your answer to the substantive question, but, in particular, a long time ago Andrew Adonis and I, as Schools Ministers, agreed to fund the IB diploma programme so that it was available in every local authority area. It has subsequently been defunded, and I am just interested in your relationship, as the International Baccalaureate organisation, with the Department for Education, and the appetite that state-funded schools might have to use your qualifications and get them funded.
Matthew Glanville: As people have said, the barriers are the funding, the EBacc and Progress 8. We speak regularly with the Department for Education and regularly try to explain to it why we believe that the IB education philosophy, whether it is the MYP level or the DP level, benefits schools, and to highlight situations where it has been very successful, not in the state school system, where it is not funded, but in the private school system in the UK. We are constantly trying to talk to the department to see whether there is any opportunity to allow schools to have this alternative route and one that is well understood.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Do you think that its antipathy, assuming that that is what it is, is that it is just too awkward to work out how to make it fit in the accountability system, or is it something deeper than that that means they do not want to fund it? It might be the cost. You might be ridiculously expensive, for all I know.
Matthew Glanville: I am not able to read the minds of the Ministers and officials who are currently preventing it. There is a certain desire at the moment for the flagship education process to be the English education system, rather than adapting something else. For everybody who wants to offer something different, there is a challenge. A lot of what we are also trying to do is to flag why what we are doing is very good and to help to explain why IB elements can be adopted.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Post 16, as well as the diploma programme, the IB offers a more vocational programme. Do you ever consider a more vocational track to the MYP or do you think that it covers off vocational, technical and academic—or head, heart, hand, however you choose to describe it?
Matthew Glanville: What we really want our 11 to 16-year-olds to be learning can be done within the framework of the MYP at the moment. It is a framework rather than a curriculum in some sense, which means that our schools have more opportunities, as long as they are delivering on the thinking skills and the examples of how it is all interlinked. That is the opportunity there. For schools that need the academic element, we offer the MYP assessment at the end. I do not think we would go down the route of a vocational MYP e-assessment at the moment, because that is not a skillset that we have.
There are rigorous and academically meaningful ways of testing some of the broader range of skills that we have talked about. I do not want us to relegate those agile problem-solving skills to the “un‑assessable” space. We can; it is more challenging. But you should be holding us and Ofqual to account for being able to do that.
Q126 Lord Mair: We have already touched on AI a few times. I want to ask you more about the opportunities for greater use of technology, both for education and for assessment—they obviously go together. What are the opportunities? Will the assessment methods need to adapt to evolving technologies? What are the challenges and risks?
Sarah Fletcher: Can I start with an opportunity? I am working with a wonderful organisation that is seeking to make its publications available, and it has already signed with Penguin Random House. This is not open AI; it is closed. It is intended to produce a programme that will help to close the literacy gap, and it is superb. It enables children in primary schools and right the way through to state their preferences in terms of topics and reading materials, and the AI will produce for them accessible, relevant examples of reading that will appeal to them and help to improve their literacy. Their teachers can play a part in how this develops too.
It includes grammatical constructs and vocabulary—all the sorts of things that teachers are wanting to develop. It could provide every family that this will be available to, once it is up and running, with open access to all the publications of Penguin Random House, which is phenomenal. AI can do that in reading and mathematics. We have an enormous possibility here to close learning gaps and to make a huge difference to the education of our young people through the use of AI, and we need to seize that.
On opportunities for assessment, there seems to be more scepticism about how well AI can mark complicated essays. Perhaps we are not there yet. It is very good at marking shorter answers; it is less good at creativity. I do not necessarily think that we should put a cap on it, but we should be careful not to run before we can walk. We also need to be very careful that there is proper regulation around it, because if we are going to assess young people using AI, we have to be very sure that the algorithms at its root and the way it is developed are genuinely equitable and assessing the skills that we want them to assess. There must be caution, but the opportunities are immense.
Lord Mair: So what you have just said are the challenges and risks.
Sarah Fletcher: The other challenge and risk is what everyone is talking about with ChatGPT, which is the opportunity for plagiarism and cheating. A much bigger risk to education and, in fact, to everything is the whole issue of truth and what can feed into it, which can create conspiracy theories and all sorts of falsehoods, which will create a massive problem beyond schools. There are real challenges with the way AI is developing.
There are solutions to the issue of plagiarism. I have already given you one example of how we are framing questions in our school-directed courses so that AI cannot do them. In our creative technologies course, which we have developed ourselves, the students produce coursework precisely on the ethical issues surrounding technology. They do it under controlled conditions. We run through ChatGPT how it would answer the question, and we give it to the students and say, “There you are. You can incorporate that in the way you think about and analyse the problems”. In other words, use it for what it is best used for. Rather than hide, bring it into the open. It is very clear then that they are using it positively rather than as a piece of plagiarism. We have to be clever about how we frame and ask questions. We should not deny generative AI. We should use it and embrace it, but be aware of the risks.
Alistair McConville: I will be brief on this, because it is not my area of expertise. One obvious benefit is the potential individualisation of each child’s experience. There are already really good AI-driven platforms to help to move students’ learning on. There is a programme called Century Tech that adapts to a child’s demonstration of their knowledge through a learning platform and takes them on to the most appropriate bit. The development of those sorts of learning tools is really exciting.
As far as assessment goes, the thing I am most interested in at the moment is comparative judgment and the use of technology to support it. It is very difficult to get two people to agree which out of two essays should be a 17 or an 18, but it is quite easy to get people to agree on which one is better, oddly, and therefore easy to rank things based on quite holistic judgments. Technology is enabling that to happen much more quickly now, even enabling the ranking of portfolios based on holistic judgments so that even where something is quite disparate in its component parts you can quite quickly get to judgments, when necessary, about which are in the top quartile or the second quartile. That is very interesting.
Matthew Glanville: The most important point is that, since their inception, the MYP assessments have been digital. That allows us to start testing things that are really important to test and that you cannot do on a blank piece of paper. It allows you to have that interactive experience. In sciences, for example, it allows the student to control which variables vary, rather than almost giving them the answer and asking them to spot it. With video technology and 3D images, there is so much more that we can do using digital assessments to really focus on what is important on the assessment side. I am a huge advocate of that. It is also the way our students interact at the moment. The key thing there, though, is that we also need that to filter into how the students experience learning and education in the classroom, so there are huge possibilities there.
We have summed up very nicely that artificial intelligence will be a reality for many of our students in the future, so we need to teach them what ethical use looks like. That is why the IB has not banned its use but said, “Please use it but reference it properly”. There is great opportunity in the marking. I am still not confident enough that it will mark effectively, but once we get to that point, and I am sure we will, that opens up opportunities for things like adaptive testing.
What we must not do with digital is have a race to the bottom. We must not allow it to go to narrow multiple choice or drag and drop. At the moment, adaptive testing requires instant marking, which can be done only if it is a narrow right/wrong answer. In the future, if artificial intelligence can mark for us, maybe we can start to use it. The advantages of adaptive testing mean that you give the students the tests that show what they can do, rather than giving them opportunities to muck up what they do not need to do.
I am very glad that you mentioned comparative judgment. That is a really powerful, different way of assessing, which the IB has been exploring, particularly with our theory of knowledge, which is the classic one: “It’s very hard to agree on what the mark is, but very easy to agree on what’s a good or a bad answer”. It is really about how we reflect the way young people learn, engage and see things. A paper exam is just so foreign to them. Indeed, we have schools where the poor students have to learn how to write a three-hour essay by hand again, because they have got used to word processing and everything else.
Lord Baker of Dorking: On that point, I agree entirely with you. I went into a class in one of my UTCs. They were doing GCSE exams and they were all doing it on their computers. They will produce digital answers, which are much easier to read than handwritten answers. People do not handwrite letters. The only handwritten letters that I write today are either congratulatory or consoling someone on a bereavement. You do not use handwriting today. The future is digital coding.
Matthew Glanville: They are still writing answers to a flat paper exam. They are not using the opportunities even to have videos in those papers to refer to rather than written texts.
Q127 Baroness Garden of Frognal: None of you sounds totally convinced by GCSEs, so do you have any plans for future qualifications? What changes would you prioritise making on assessment of qualifications in the 11-16 phase of education more generally?
Matthew Glanville: There needs to be a much more balanced approach between exam and non-exam assessment approaches. Not everything that is important can be assessed through an exam. We need to recognise that and, therefore, allow students to have other ways of doing it. We also need to move towards thinking about the learning to learn skills and valuing applying skills to a new situation, rather than just to one that is very familiar to the student.
Alistair McConville: I would like to see the requirement for eight subjects in Progress 8 reviewed to create more space for alternative kinds of learning experiences, particularly including project qualifications, which all students should have access to. We should be moving towards a digital learner profile, which is what the Times Education Commission has recommended and what Louise Hayward’s report has recommended, so that we can capture a broader range of evidence and remove the accountability pressures that tie everyone to eight, nine or 10 GCSEs.
Sarah Fletcher: In addition, we are developing a qualification in, for want of a better phrase, design thinking. We have the EPQ, based on individual projects, which is wonderful. We now need to create something, which is perfectly possible to do and which we have already been trialling, in group work and complex problem solving. We are tagging it to the 17 sustainability goals. We are working with Chatham House. We are working to produce a really interesting extended project qualification equivalent—EPQ level and easily HPQ too—and would like to take it down the scale and introduce it into primary schools. It is about teamwork, collaboration and problem solving.
The Chair: I would like to thank our panellists very much for coming in. It has been a stimulating session and we are very grateful for your time. Thank you.
