Yes to abolishing GCSEs, no to bringing back O Levels

The leak of Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plans to replace GCSEs with O levels and CSEs, supposedly by 2016, can be said to have had the desired political impact. It won support from Tory MPs, the Mail and the Telegraph, and even from listeners to Radio 4’s “Question Time.” Whether it makes educational sense, or has any chance of happening, may be less important than the impact on Gove’s chances of future Tory leadership.

In the past we needed O levels or GCSEs because many young people left school at 16. We don’t live in that world anymore; within three years full-time education will be compulsory until the age of 18. So why step back in time?



The old division between O levels for the more academic and CSEs for the “less intelligent” (to use the Mail’s term) was replaced in 1988 with GCSEs. Although there are still two levels in most subjects (Foundation and Higher), both follow a similar syllabus and students are not left with an inferior qualification on their CV.

This won’t help achieve a level playing field for our students—one of the most urgent needs in our education system. Research published last week  found a two year achievement gap between clever rich and clever poor children in England—that’s twice the level of our continental rivals. Chris Cook, the Financial Times education correspondent, has pointed out the effect the O level proposal would have on social mobility. The likelihood of sitting CSEs would, on current performance, be directly related to income with around 40% of the poorest children likely to take them compared to only 10% of the richest.

But do we need either GCSEs or O levels? In 2011 the OECD reported that England placed a disproportionate effort on test results. They argued that we risked spending too much time drilling students for exams, and not enough developing skills essential for life beyond school. As a parent of teenagers I can see their point and I am not looking forward to another three years of exams (GCSE, AS, A2) for my last offspring.

One of Gove’s first innovations was the English Baccalaureate (based on English, Maths, Science, a language and a humanity), a move to traditional subjects at the cost of practical and creative options. At the school I chair in Hackney we are proud of the students that get into top universities, sometimes using these subjects. But we are equally proud of those that get into the top art colleges.

As Christopher Frayling pointed out last week, our creative industries are responsible for 8-9% of GDP, just a couple of points less than banking. It is an area in which we lead the world, yet Gove’s focus on traditional subjects is already reducing the numbers taking creative options at school.

In contrast, China are building or developing no less than 1,250 art and design colleges. Shouldn’t we be encouraging those students who can emulate Jonathan Ive (UK-educated designer of the iPhone and iPad) as much as those who can excel in traditional subjects? We are in real danger of sacrificing our leading edge in arts and design for the sake of a return to the subjects and exams of a bygone age.

Ask a teacher what life would be like without GCSEs and AS levels and their eyes light up. “We could concentrate on real education, on creativity, on developing our young people,” they say, “instead of how to pass exams.” As a school governor I would love to be able to focus more on encouraging a love of learning and less on checking whether the school was spending enough time on exam technique.

Gove justified his proposal by talking about Singapore, who still use O levels. However Hong Kong, one of the best performing education systems in the world, has abolished both O & A levels and instead introduced a single graduation diploma. And even in Singapore, as Michael Rosen has pointed out, education is being reformed to “produce students who can create, collaborate, think critically and compete globally in our unpredictable future.”

The truly radical solution would be to make our schools more focused on developing our young people’s abilities and less on exams. The best answer may not be to replace GCSEs with an examination suited to the needs of 60 years ago, but to abolish exams at age 16 altogether.