As this year’s exam season reached its febrile height, we were treated to the headlines declaring that the headmaster of Eton has attacked the public exam system as “archaic” – something virtually everyone working in education’s public sector already knows.
As Michael Young suggests last week in a blog post on the IOE website, what would really make the headlines is a mandate to examine why our anti-educational, anti-collaborative system of examinations has emerged and what might be the alternatives.
“The problem is that the relationships between public examinations, the curriculum (which defines the purposes of education), and the professional work of teachers, have become grossly distorted.” [Michael Young]
Exams seem to have replaced the curriculum in deciding what is taught and how.
What’s really archaic (not to mention divisive) about the current exam system is the testing of young people at 16. Whilst this made sense at a time when exams constituted a certificate of completion at the end of a person’s schooling, now it happens slap bang in the midst of what should be a continual learning journey until 19. This year students beginning education were required to stay in schooling until 17, next year that rises again to 18.
What is needed now is serious debate about how we can shift towards a curriculum-led rather than an examination-led system.
Meanwhile, across the other side of the world, Chinese educators are increasingly uneasy about their ‘success’ on the PISA League Tables.
This success is predicated on a regime of thirteen-hour days worked by students, and rising suicide rates. A system where the rich have the competitive advantage of being able to move into good school districts and employ private tutors. Sound familiar?
Here’s the irony: Tony Little, (the Eton Head) again, “We seem intent on creating the same straitjacket the Chinese are trying to wriggle out of.”
As Michael Young suggests last week in a blog post on the IOE website, what would really make the headlines is a mandate to examine why our anti-educational, anti-collaborative system of examinations has emerged and what might be the alternatives.
“The problem is that the relationships between public examinations, the curriculum (which defines the purposes of education), and the professional work of teachers, have become grossly distorted.” [Michael Young]
Exams seem to have replaced the curriculum in deciding what is taught and how.
What’s really archaic (not to mention divisive) about the current exam system is the testing of young people at 16. Whilst this made sense at a time when exams constituted a certificate of completion at the end of a person’s schooling, now it happens slap bang in the midst of what should be a continual learning journey until 19. This year students beginning education were required to stay in schooling until 17, next year that rises again to 18.
What is needed now is serious debate about how we can shift towards a curriculum-led rather than an examination-led system.
Meanwhile, across the other side of the world, Chinese educators are increasingly uneasy about their ‘success’ on the PISA League Tables.
This success is predicated on a regime of thirteen-hour days worked by students, and rising suicide rates. A system where the rich have the competitive advantage of being able to move into good school districts and employ private tutors. Sound familiar?
Here’s the irony: Tony Little, (the Eton Head) again, “We seem intent on creating the same straitjacket the Chinese are trying to wriggle out of.”
