The new president of the Girls’ School Association wants to lower the mental burdens that are placed upon teenagers by the exam system
England’s school exam system needs an overhaul in order to lower the mental burdens that they place upon teenagers striving for the “holy grail” of results, this is according to the new leader of the Girls’ School Association.
Samantha Price, who is the head of Benenden School in Kent, wants reforms on how and when school pupils are examined, including a possible delay to the start of degree courses until January rather than autumn, in order to allow students more time in order to make course applications and do work experience, as well as learn skills such as financial literacy.
“I don’t think our current assessment system is any longer fit for purpose, and I don’t think our university application system is fit for purpose. I don’t think it’s fair across the sectors, and I also don’t think it caters for young people’s mental health,” Price said, in her first comments since she took the role as the president of the GSA, which represents girls’ schools.
Price had admitted that “not all my fellow school leaders may agree” but called for a serious look into whether ‘high-stakes’ exam papers such as GCSEs and A-levels were appropriate for 16- and 18-year-olds in their current iteration.
This comes after Dr Yvonne Doyle, Director for Public Health England, said that she understood parents’ nervousness about schools returning after the summer within England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but she insisted that they were not “hubs of infection”.
The government in England is preparing to publish results from its consultation on post-qualification university admissions, which is likely to recommend some major changes to the timing and structure of applications so that decision-making takes place following A-level results having been published.
“For school students with their sights on a traditional university degree course, we need to overhaul the admissions system to embrace either post-qualification offers or applications. This would be a much fairer system for all young people and would reduce the pressure on them in their final year of school,” Price said.
“We have to recognise that there is a mental health crisis in our country’s young people. Doing away with predicted grade offers and moving to a post-qualification system would minimise the negative impact of striving for the ‘holy grail’ of grades.”
Bringing forward the A-level exam dates would enable the admissions process to be completed for the traditional autumn start. Alternatively, Price said that the university year could instead begin in January.
Price, who is the head of a boarding school that charges £40,000 a year for admission, also said that there were questions over whether a university degree was still a better option than either apprenticeships or other options.
“The extent to which universities may or may not offer value for money has been questioned for a number of years … Lingering student loan debt long into adulthood is a very real problem not only for individuals but also for the country as a whole,” Price said.
A separate report that was conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), published on Monday, found that the quality and duration of home-schooling in England improved during the coronavirus lockdown earlier in the year, but that many students will struggle to catch up because of the effects of lost learning during the previous national lockdown in 2020.
This comes after the ONS said that some 1,603 deaths from suicide occurred between April and July of 2020, around 75% of which were males. The suicide rate within both England and Wales fell during the first national coronavirus lockdown, analysis of death registrations suggests.
The government’s major effort to recover the learning has been through a national programme of tutoring. But the IFS has found that among the poorest fifth of families, while 36% of the pupils had been offered extra tutoring by March of 2021, nearly a third of these had chosen not to take it up.
By contrast, while a similar share of those who live in the most affluent families had been offered additional tutoring, only one in seven of them had turned it down.
Angus Phimister, an author of the IFS report, said: “Catch-up policies need to be carefully designed to be taken up by poorer pupils if they are to have any chance of putting a dent in the educational inequalities that have grown so much wider during the pandemic.”
