Exam Nation

Highlights from The Exam Man podcast- Season 2, episode 3

At the start of Season 2 we welcomed author Sammy Wright onto The Exam Man podcast, to talk about his book Exam Nation. Over the summer, the book was reviewed in The Guardian and The Times amongst others, and it was Book of the Week on Radio 4 in August. Once we established that Sammy wasn't attempting to make Exams Officers redundant, we entered into a lively discussion about not just the purpose of exams, but also of school. We heard about what Sammy thinks about how we assess what students learn, what he thinks about technology and exams, and he told us what he hopes will come out of the upcoming Curriculum and Assessment Review.

Sammy sat on the government's Social Mobility Commission from 2018 to 2021. He has taught for twenty years at schools in Oxfordshire, London and the North East. His debut novel “Fit” won the Northern Book Prize and he is currently Head of School at Southmoor Academy in Sunderland.

So, Sammy, we first came across your book when someone sent me an opinion piece that you'd written that was sensationally titled “Should We Abolish Exams?” We wondered if you were trying to make us redundant? But then I actually read your piece!

Sometimes one can't avoid headlines....

It was a good headline. It was a really good headline - I clicked on it! Obviously you have a very nuanced take on the role of exams and their function as a method of assessment. So could you talk us through how you see exams operating within the current system and also your view of exams more generally? 

I think the position is actually much more complex than that headline. My book is subtitled, “Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone”. I think that I do want to draw a distinction between exams and grades and also between the action and the use of it. Over the last couple of decades a lot of the focus on school improvement has been about how we can measure the outcomes. We've ended up in a position where we focus a lot on a couple of key qualities of exams. If you look at the last round of exam reforms, they were all about comparability.

And the big thing that Michael Gove objected to in the previous set of GCSEs and other qualifications at level 2 was that you had some that were “easier than others”. In his mind that created a problem, because it meant that you couldn't directly compare a result in, say, child development to a result in maths. I think that's the basic logical fallacy that I object to. The idea that everything has to be comparable, and that we can possibly produce an authoritative ranking of saying this is the best score, and then this is the next best score, and these kids are therefore ranked in this precise order. Because anyone who actually works in schools knows that there is a lot of complexity goes into how kids achieve. I'll give you an example. A lovely young man that I know, really delightful, he's 15 and he's just done his French a year early, and he has smashed it. He got a 9, he got 99 percent, he did really, really well. It's entirely “coincidental” that his parents have got a holiday home in France and are fluent in French. We are definitely measuring his fluency in French. That is going to tell any employer this kid knows French. That's an important piece of information. But what it's not going to tell any employer is the general sense of wider aptitude.

And that is one of the issues with exams - it doesn't tell us nothing, but it's not the same as saying this kid is absolutely the brightest kid you will ever meet ever. Because actually the reason he scored that is to do with other circumstances too. We've tended to treat particularly GCSEs as these general measures of aptitude, these ways of ranking and defining kids in quite a specific fine-grained way that are supposedly then going to be applicable to a whole series of domains that are irrelevant to the actual qualification. So as one example, Birmingham Medical School for years (I'm not sure whether they still do it) used to insist on a certain range of seven A-stars at GCSE in order to get on to a medical degree, which seems odd to me, given that those seven A-stars might mean a lot of different things.

So how do you think exams should be used? What would be an effective use of exams within the system? What would be an effective, if not a grading system, alternative system for assessing students?

I'm going to digress slightly to the history of schools, because I think this is a really important point. We think we have universal schooling in Britain up to the age of 18. That is the legal position. The way that's developed is we had universal schooling that was primary education for many years, and until 1944 secondary education was always selective and specifically geared at kids going into the academic sphere. What happened in 1944 was that we created compulsory secondary education, but we did so on the same model of the previous selective education. We had the grammar schools, the secondary moderns and the technical colleges, but in effect, the secondary moderns and the technical colleges were new definitions that were invented and not defined very well. The process over the next couple of decades, which wasn't driven by government, by the way, but by parents, was that essentially they all said, secondary moderns are short changing our kids, we want the grammar style education. So when you get to the “comprehensivisation” of secondary education, it's actually a “grammarisation” of secondary education. I'm not saying good or bad, but I'm saying we have to recognise that all of those structures are designed with an academic end in mind. We have never as a country really grappled with what it would take to give a good general education that is applicable to all and would be relevant for all careers. So that, I think, is the first point. In my book, I don't really recommend changes to Post 16, partly because I didn't want to give teachers a total heart attack. There are problems with Post 16, but basically they do what they say on the tin. An A level prepares you for academic study. BTEC prepares you for the world of work. They are effectively functional, and because there’s that much wider choice, they fit with the path that people are taking. What doesn't fit is the idea that everyone at 16 needs to prove themselves in a very narrow academic sphere.

What would schooling up to 16 look like if you could tweak it in a way to get the outcomes that you would like to see?

There's a lot of things that I end up suggesting. I mean, the book is not just about exams. It's about the wider ecosystems of schools as well. But if we're talking about assessment, the thing that I think is key is in just challenging this idea that we have to have a million separate assessments for so-called separate subjects. That’s an interesting suggestion in some of the prevailing research and ideologies of the last decade, which has been dominated by the idea of knowledge-rich education, the work of E.D. Hirsch and people like that, who effectively say get the building blocks of knowledge right and then the skills will follow. They also say that knowledge is domain-specific and it doesn't necessarily transfer from one domain to another.

What I think is really interesting is I essentially agree with that research, but I question how it's been applied. My feeling is you have to think very carefully about the actual specific knowledge in each subject. So the best example is English and Maths. We do English and Maths in this siloed way, but of course they are exactly the very definition of something which isn't siloed. English comprehension I think should be assessed by your history essays or your citizenship essays. Why do a whole separate exam where you're being shown a random text with no relevance to anything and encourage all this time spent looking at random little bits of stuff, which doesn't actually give you any bloody knowledge?

Are you not a big fan of the English GCSE exam, Sammy?

No. Do you know what? I teach English. I teach literature and language in the same class. I got some lovely messages from my students at the end of last year. There was one particular girl who said, I've loved the class, it's been fantastic. (I'm paraphrasing.) Then she said, but please, stick with literature, don't teach language - it makes me die inside. I don't know if that's my teaching or the language. But either way, I'm not a fan.

Is there anything else that you would like to see come out of the Curriculum and Assessment Review? There's obviously some really big things that you're discussing in the book around this, but is there anything specific, anything else that you would like to see, particularly related to assessment?

One of the impetuses behind writing this book was I'd been on the Social Mobility Commission for three years, and in that time I'd had to make recommendations to government, and we were always in this awkward position of having to present something that we thought people would listen to. And so, you find yourself constrained at all times by what the norms are. And so, I was very keen in this book to write what I thought, and to present recommendations that were quite big, and actually were not constrained by possibility or political acceptability.

The other thing I did find in looking at it is how the best educational reform is long term. So, when I look at Curriculum Review, it's not just that I don't expect it to come up with the conclusions that I came to, but I wouldn't want it to in the short term. What I would hope for is, in the short term, some fairly straightforward things like thinning out the content in GCSE exams, removing the requirement for EBacc, changing the primary curriculum a bit in terms of the SATs, and, this is also coming through the Ofsted reform, changing the subject specialism at primary, which I think has been really difficult, particularly for small primaries. So, there's lots of little things like that that I think are really quite urgent and need doing. And then what I would hope is that it comes up with some big thinking that could be presented to the population at an election in five years' time. We could actually decide, does this seem like a thing that we would want to do? And then we'd have a mandate and could have that long afterlife.

I think that's an interesting thing when we look back at Gove's reforms. That's the last time the system underwent major reforms. I also think if he had presented those reforms with a bit more time, a bit more space and a bit more inclusion of the teaching body, he wouldn't have had the kickback that he did. Because actually most people I know now respect some of the basic underpinnings of them. Like me, they might criticise specific ways they were implemented, but I think if he'd consulted and listened at the time, then that could have been ironed out too. It's a real lesson in how, when we need bold reform, we need to bring everyone with us. And that's what I would hope for. The thing I'm thinking a lot about at the moment, and I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I am actually reducing the number of GCSEs that kids are taking. Intellectually, I want them to have the breadth, but they can't cope because it’s just too many exams. Can we get them through with doing eight subjects or even seven? I just want to get them ready for the next stage because the system doesn't seem kind enough to them at the moment.

Will you try and offer breadth in a different way?

The way I'm trying to think of it at the moment, and this is all very early days, but we're increasingly thinking in terms of how you approach the options process going into year 10. Some kids will have more options than others, depending on whether they can cope with the demands of it, but then you actually revisit again after the end of year 10 and you have built into the timetable a chance for people to actually drop down an option because, to be fair, that's what I did when I did GCSEs. That always worked well with the A-level system, when you did an AS and then drop down because it means that you can actually make a reasoned assessment to say I'm not doing so well in this, I think I'm going to concentrate on the others. You've still had the benefit of a year of it, you haven't missed out on the chance to look at something, but you're focusing on the things that you're going to try and get the grades in going forward.

You don't think that exams in and of themselves as a method of assessment are a bad thing, right? I just wanted to clarify that. That's your position, right?

Yes. That’s right.

So could you explain to us your views on other methods of assessment and maybe just talk about what their strengths and weaknesses are relative to exams?

This is where I have a thing which has been formulated in my mind, and it sounds really, really weird. Essentially, I think the biggest problem we have with exams and with all forms of assessment is needing them to be accurate. The accuracy thing and this idea of being able to put a label on it, that foregrounds the summative nature of an exam. The fact that it is saying, right, ultimately at the end, this is what that person is. I'm not sure that's possible and I am much more interested in exams and assessment as formative things. The reason I think exams are worthwhile and we shouldn't be getting rid of them, is they're a very, very good way of making sure people go away and learn things for themselves. Which is a far better way of embedding them and actually learning them.

And a skill for life, isn't it? I've got a quote here from your book, Sammy, where you say, the point of revision is not to pass exams, rather it's the point of exams to make you revise and fix the knowledge and skills for their own sake. So that's basically what you're saying, that you use exams to deepen knowledge?

Exactly. And I think that's how we need to approach assessment in general. I think we need to know the weaknesses of each method, we're not being blind about it, but we have to actually incorporate that into the way we use it. But the other thing I'm going to say about assessment is the Extended Project.

You write about this in the book, don't you? You're quite a fan, aren't you?

I really like it. Partly because it was one of my first experiences of whole school leadership. I introduced it in 2008 when it first came out in my then school. I was fascinated because essentially to me it seems that the Extended Project is quite an ambitious idealistic qualification that you're testing how far someone journeys from their starting point and how they organize themselves. If you look at it, you could think it’s a bit woolly. You might say, this is a bit open to abuse. People at home could sit and really help you with this, and you could get a tutor to help you with this, and so on. Actually, that hasn't been borne out by what's happened with it. The amazing thing they did when they put it in place was they framed it in consultation with the universities as something that would never be asked for as the main offer for university. It might help if you missed a grade, but it wasn't a core requirement. The universities promised that. It wasn't included in the main part of the league tables. Because of that, there's no incentive for the teachers to turn a blind eye to that kind of gaming. There's no incentive because we can actually let them fail. That's an amazing thing educationally, to be able to say, you cocked up, sorry mate, you're not getting the grade. Isn't it also with the EPQ as well, there's quite a lot of assessment, isn't there, of the processes that are followed as opposed to the end result, the outcome, which means that actually it's harder to game in that respect as well. Definitely. It's well designed like that. But I think the point I would say with it is, you can genuinely at the end of it, have a question about really was that one better than this? And because they're so divergent, it is genuinely impossible to say. The purpose of this qualification is not to be able to say definitively X is better than Y. The purpose of it is for the kids to have had an amazing learning experience and for potentially an employer or university to be able to know roughly, does this person manage to self-organize?

One question that I had going round in my head when I read your book was, does Sammy believe in meritocracy as an idea? Not is there a meritocracy, and not does it function. But does he believe in it as an idea?

I think one of the big things that we have to understand in the modern world is scale. We often have a philosophical or theological, ideological framework that comes from times when the scale of populations that we were talking about was much smaller. So for example, within a village I think you could have a meritocracy. You can apply judgment and people can be in the places that they are supposed to be. But the problem is when scale changes, then a lot of the other incentives change. In Britain today, if you are notionally competing against every other person in Britain, then it is genuinely impossible to equalise that playing field for two reasons. Number one, you just can't have everyone being in the same circumstance. Number two, say we are talking about meritocracy in terms of civil service, all the bloody jobs are in London. So if you are asking someone to enter into that world, I am not saying all the jobs, but the good ones are in London. If you really want to make it in that world, you go to London. And that means, if they are more rooted in the local community, that you are asking people to give up a lot. And I think that what we don't talk about in meritocracy is costs. For a kid like me growing up in a middle class home, there were very different costs to moving. I went from Edinburgh, where I grew up, to Oxford for university. It was a massive dislocation, but it wasn't that much of a dislocation because of various aspects of the cultural capital I’d grown up with. That's a different cost that you're asking me to pay, than you would be asking someone from a different background to pay. Meritocracy is always phrased entirely about the benefits, and it never has that calculus of cost in it. I would say that there is a possibility for meritocracy, but it lies in something that I found astonishing when I started work on the Social Mobility Commission. The first presentation I had was from the late John Hills, and he showed us the Gatsby Curve, which shows the direct correlation between inequality and social mobility. Basically, if you've got an unequal society, people don't move as much, because it means that people hoard opportunity, and the penalty for not moving becomes much bigger. So if you actually want a meritocracy, then what you have to do is ensure that to the best of your ability, everyone has a social welfare safety net, everyone has the same grade of employers in their area, and everyone has the social infrastructure that actually allows parenting to happen. All of those things that we've neglected in this country, they're the essential things for meritocracy to actually work.

Could you just give us your view quickly on technology in education, and maybe touch on technology in exams as well, if you've got anything to say around that?

I think this is a really difficult one, but there's a basic principle. When we invented the car, if we’d used that to mean that we never walked - we would be very, very ill. I always say to my students, we don't write essays so that we've got an essay. No one needs the essay once you've done it. I just put it in the bin. But we write them to have written an essay. So in that sense, I don't think it makes any difference to what you might do in the curriculum, because hopefully what you do is designed around what will allow kids' brains to expand. But I do think that the justification behind handwritten exams is increasingly going to be hard to defend for two reasons. There is a scientific rationale that actually sometimes there is greater fluency when you're writing by hand. But there is a separate thing, which is that if you look in schools across the country, increasingly people are putting kids in for use of laptops.

Didn't you say why aren't we assessing touch typing?

Exactly. I literally, I have been doing that with my son. I spoke to him yesterday and asked him about various things and I said to him - what do you enjoy about school? We had a nice candid conversation. He said he hates anything when he has to write. I said, do you mind typing? He says no. So I said, well, let's do some touch typing and let's do that. Because it just seems to me like I would love a world in which we all had little Moleskin notebooks. But I don't think that's the world that we're going to get. I think if we make handwriting a bar to success, then we're going to exclude a lot of very able kids. I guess one of the things, though, with your analogy with walking and a car is that you can't know if there will be unintended consequences, say, if we stopped teaching kids to write. Because we don't necessarily know what the connections are between writing and other skills or other kinds of brain development. I don't think I'm advocating that we never teach kids to write. I just think that probably by the time you get to 16, if we're talking about that kind of general preparation for adulthood, it's almost the case that the decision has already been made. Because so many kids do use laptops, and because it does seem, I don't have the stats for this, but certainly anecdotally, that in smaller private schools, a lot of kids use laptops. And not just in private schools either.

You get these schools that are like Chromebook schools, don't you? What's your view on the use of technology more generally in education? Are there any risks that you see, not from the technology itself, but by the way that people want to use it or introduce it?

One of the big messages I want people to take out of the book is this notion that school is a home, it's a place for kids to be. Imagine you've got a ten-year-old. If I say I could give your ten-year-old a pill that would contain all the knowledge they needed, and that would be it, they didn't need school, would you be happy for them just to leave school? I think most people would say no, because actually school isn't just the knowledge. I think there's ways in which AI and EdTech can help us, but I think we have to be quite careful to say that what school is doing is not just delivering knowledge. It’s the last viable bit of community I think that we have left. I think that all the other things that we've created have atomised in the 21st century, and school is a place where people actually come together into a building, and I think we need that. I've been really looking forward to saying this phrase.....my book is available from all good booksellers!

To contact Sammy: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sammy-wright-a4300a64

To order Exam Nation: https://housmans.com/product/exam-nation-why-our-obsession-with-grades-fails-everyone-and-a-better-way-to-think-about-school/