Each year, during the school Easter holidays, an epidemic emerges amongst 16-year olds. It goes largely unnoticed. You won’t see much in the media – though you might observe young people lamenting it on social media.
Under our noses, in plain sight, they are stuffing themselves. Why? Because they must. What are they stuffing themselves full of? Facts. They are revising for their GCSEs. In the age of the smartphone, when we have at our fingertips the sum total of human knowledge, young people are required to memorise large amounts of information, which they then regurgitate in exams.
A few weeks later, after the exams, they can forget most of it – never again will they need to cram this variety of knowledge into their heads. Most exams are in subjects they will never study again.
If you don’t believe me, here’s an example. If you do an Engineering GCSE and you sit the AQA specification, there are six topic areas. Look at the first of these, Engineering materials, and you will find a long list of subtopics. Metals and alloys, polymers, composites, costs and supply, factors influencing design and so on – all useful, but this is just one strand of one subject that students need to know.
In 1854, Charles Dickens published Hard Times, in which the famous character Thomas Gradgrind espouses the pursuit of facts. 171 years later, the English education system still forces its young people to contort their brains into a Gradgrind-esque mindset. Dickens’s nineteenth century satire is not far from twenty-first century reality.
However, the memorising of facts is only half the challenge. Once securely lodged in teenage brains, the facts must then be regurgitated in exam conditions.
In most cases the exams are handwritten. Students congregate in exam halls, and against the clock, they write. They write and write and write, like disgorging mouthbrooders until, at the end, an invigilator proclaims “pens down!”
Can you think of a single career where this skillset of cramming and handwritten regurgitation (followed by immediately dropping most of the subjects) would be useful? Are there any workplaces in 2025 that operate in this way?
The system is ripe for reform, and some aspects are already being eroded around the edges. More and more children – for a variety of individual reasons – qualify for extra time in exams, alleviating some of the pressure on them.
Others receive different adaptations – most commonly the right to write using a laptop, rather than by hand. Some exam boards plan to make laptops the norm and I predict that within ten years, no GCSEs will be written by hand. This will provoke further education reform: if the requirement to hand write long exams becomes obsolete, do students still need the skill of handwriting?
I use tech a great deal. I am often (too often) to be found at my laptop. Nevertheless, I enjoy writing by hand. I enjoy holding a pen and forming the letters on the page. I like decent pens (especially fountain pens) and writing cards – birthday cards, Christmas cards, postcards and so on – though I admit it is a while since I wrote a letter by hand.
At The Beacon we encourage boys to send a postcard to the Headmaster from their holidays and there is a weekly slot at assembly where these are celebrated. Beacon boys’ holiday destinations are eclectic!
Like it or not, the significance of handwriting is declining. Even signatures, once part of one’s identity and persona, are rarely needed. Do you remember practising yours as a child? Nowadays, documents can be electronically “signed”, and you are more likely to confirm your identity using an authenticator app than by signing your name.
GCSEs are high stakes and for students who do not successfully jump through the hoops of cramming/regurgitation, the impact can last a lifetime. How can we make learning more effective and bring assessment up to date to better prepare our students for their future careers?
Oracy is a buzzword in education, and this is an area where we aim to develop boys’ skills at The Beacon. We have a hybrid curriculum subject called “Self & Society”, which encompasses theology, philosophy, PSHE, ethics and morality. It is assessed using viva voce presentations rather than written exams, and boys (and parents) enjoy and value this approach.
In the Upper School (years 7 and 8 at The Beacon) boys complete a “PSPQ” – Pre-Senior Project Qualification, like an EPQ – in which they research and present a topic of their choice. This provides the opportunity to become expert in a subject that deeply interests them, without the requirement to prove their knowledge in a written exam.
Our Cooking & Nutrition curriculum emphasises practical culinary skills, healthy eating and inventing new recipes. In History, boys select a recipient of the Victoria Cross from the First World War, and present on who they were and what they did to win the VC.
These methods of teaching and learning might leave Thomas Gradgrind spluttering with dissatisfaction. However, later in Hard Times, when Gradgrind realises the negative impact of his techniques, he becomes reflective and re-thinks his approach. Perhaps it is time for the GCSE system to do that too.
