Are we getting meaningful changes in assessment?

The School Exam - Alber Anker (1862) http://www.sikart.ch/Werke.aspx?id=6002621

This is the fifth installment of my blog series on the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review. In this brief blog, I want to focus on some of the commentary on assessment and the proposals for changes. To return to the rest of the blog click HERE. This is an interesting one as I have written a lot about the problems inherent in the GCSE exam system in recent years:

Dealing with the disease: The urgent need for exam reform - andallthat.co.uk
Examinations: The Gilded Age - andallthat.co.uk
Examinations: Searching for Gold - andallthat.co.uk
Examinations: After the Gold Rush - andallthat.co.uk
 
Let’s begin then with the positives here. I am very interested to see what happens with V Levels. I think there is a lot of potential here - especially for qualification which speak to significant global challenges. There is huge scope for V levels to address issues which address pressing social and planetary scale challenges. It is notable how much museums, archives, and History departments in universities are now grappling with concepts of decolonisation and globalisation. As a great fan of the GCSE History Pilot course of the early 2000s, I genuinely hope there is scope for meaningful vocational qualifications which bring History and other subjects into conversation (jointly or individually) with issues of justice at the local and planetary scale. 
 
Less exciting, though expected, is the news that the current system of assessment at 16 seems set to remain. The justification for this, against what I assume was a large body of feedback, seems weak at best. We have the claim that ‘England is by no means an international outlier in providing national exams at 16’ (p12). Or, in other words, everyone else is doing it. Beyond which, we are only left with the oft cited claim that ‘the system must maintain the important role of exams…[because they are] the fairest way of assessing students nationally’ (p12). Yet there is a contradiction. We are told that ‘our national assessment and qualifications are, broadly, working well’ (p8) but the attainment gaps noted in the report and the huge body of critical feedback suggest this cannot be true for all pupils. Those pupils for whom exams arguably matter the most are also those most likely to be underserved by them. The lack of engagement with a more fundamental rethink of examinations feels like a huge, missed opportunity. Given that this also impacts the most disadvantaged pupils most significantly, the lack of change is actively harming those most in need of change. 
 
The suggestion to reduce the volume of exams by 10% feels to be vaguely sensible, but its workings in practice will be difficult to navigate. Reducing the content of a History exam which has to cover two units for instance will be challenging, and not always helpful for pupils. History already has very narrow domain sampling and extremely poor agreement between markers at question level. Fewer questions will actually exacerbate this problem, as will less time. We saw this in AQA’s 2016 decsion to have 2 papers instead of 3. Moving to shorter form answers risks reducing the validity of the examination and runs counter to desires to stop History becoming a rote recall subject. It is good to note that performance examination will remain in subjects like Dance and Drama but disappointing to see that a form of controlled assessment cannot be returned to History. 
 
Equally the development of English and Maths tests for Year 8 feels like it is filling a gap left when National Curriculum levels were abolished. Levels, of course, were a very imperfect tool, but the vacuum left by their absence was variously filled by assessment methods of wildly varying quality. I am not fundamentally opposed to having formal checking points in Key Stage 3, but I am not convinced that adding another accountability layer linked to a high-stakes exam solves the issue. A better question to ask might be why so many struggle with English and Maths. The report itself places part of the blame for the transition dip at the door of Primary schools. We are told that ‘students entering Key Stage 3 without these strong foundations often struggle to build  momentum in their learning. Instead of progressing confidently, many begin to fall further behind’ (p31). Yet engagement with learning at Primary school has been found to be consistently higher than at secondary school, where it tumbles over a cliff edge at Year 7 and 8, and only slowly recovers by Year 11. Putting aside the impact of emerging teenage mindsets it seems very clear that to have an effect so large, a good part of what is going wrong must be rooted in curricular choices, pedagogical approaches, and school structures in Secondary. 
 
I won’t spend too much time on the changes to Primary assessment as they are more minimal but the retention of the phonics screening check will, I know lead to a lot of debate. It is interesting that reforms underway in Norway at the moment are actively looking at the English approach to phonics as example of how not to approach reading…and this is in a country with an incredibly phonically regular language (unlike English which has over 250 phoneme-grapheme correspondences in RP English alone). 
 
The revised GPS test sounds plausible but I won’t claim the expertise required to fully evaluate it. 

So the final conclusion on this? It's probably too early to say. Once again however, for every positive headline there appears to be something pulling the opposite way.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to comment, please do drop me a line here: Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky. To return to the rest of the blog click HERE.