LightningMinion wrote the following article with the title “Why the A-Level and GCSE examination system is not fit for purpose” criticising the education system for the Tes newspaper instead of doing his homework:

“Over 2 decades ago the former Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that the top priority of a Labour government ‘was, is and always will be education, education, education’. While he may not be active in politics nowadays, his words still ring true: education forms an intrinsic part of the lives of young people and equips them with the tools for adult life as well as kickstarting lifelong friendships and educating students about the joys of life, which is why ensuring that all students have access to a world-class education will be a top priority of any government the Labour Party may form following the election.

One key issue with our education system at secondary and sixth form level is stress: GCSE and A-Level exams are very stressful experiences for students, which is only exacerbated by the way the exams system is designed. It is designed in a fundamentally unfair way as it effectively relies on students to have a bad day on the day of their exam: in any one A-Level or GCSE exam sitting, not every student will do as well as they could have, which the grades allocation system exploits to give out lower grades to such students than what they have the ability to achieve. It is clear that our exams system is in need of reform and the Labour Party will deliver that.

One way our examination system could be reformed is by increasing the use of coursework. Coursework projects, commonly known as non exam assessments or NEA, are long-term, extended projects which test the skills of students and due to NEAs being done over an extended period of time, students are able to produce a piece of work which matches their true ability and which isn’t impacted by them having a bad day. In addition, NEAs also provide students with the skill of project management which is valuable in many sectors of the economy and for many features of adult life. A Labour government will therefore review the use of NEA in the place of exams to heap pressure off students. Some subjects, such as computer science and many humanities subjects already feature NEAs and Labour will review whether the current system in regard to these subjects is optimal. However, some subjects which would be highly suitable for an NEA do not have one - for example, A-Level Physics and Chemistry both feature a Practical Endorsement which is issued alongside the grade for the subject. The Practical Endorsement sees students complete a variety of experiments over their A-Level course to demonstrate whether they can handle scientific apparatus, carry out experiments, analyse results (the worst part of A-Level physics practicals), and more, which practically reads like a description of an NEA. However, despite this, the Practical Endorsement makes up 0% of students’ final grades and so Labour would also review this to see whether having the Practical Endorsement make up a certain proportion of the final grade of students would be beneficial.

However, for some subjects, such as mathematics (anyone who calls it math is wrong - even Google Docs is telling me that’s an incorrect spelling), coursework is simply not appropriate and exams continue to be the most appropriate way to assess students, which underscores why a review of the grading system is still necessary. One reform Labour will consider is the use of teacher assessment. Teachers know their students’ abilities far better than any piece of paper or exam board ever will and are able to give a fair assessment of the abilities of students. One possible use of teacher assessment is to have a certain proportion of the final grade of students be decided by teacher assessment, which is the system currently in place in Scotland. Another possibility would be to have the final grade of students be determined by teachers: teachers would be able to consider the performance of students in their final A-Level/GCSE exams and their performance in any NEA project, as well as their performance in class to determine what grade fairly describes their academic ability. If we were to go with such a system, we would also review whether a system would be needed for exam boards to review these teacher assessed grades to prevent any potential unfair inflation of grades.

Throughout this whole article I have kept on saying the Labour Party will review this and review that but never gave any concrete commitment to follow a particular route of reform. There is a good reason for this: it is because a Labour government would hold public consultations of teachers and students on what reforms to our examination system we should follow instead of forcing unpopular, ideological, unworkable and top-down reforms on the education system. By doing so, we will ensure that any reforms we do implement to the exams system are ones which have the support of teachers and students - they are, after all, those who work with the exams system every day and for whom it matters the most for our examination system to work.

Currently, the way we allocate grades is a statistical exercise where grades are handed out according to a normal distribution with a rightward skew to ensure that more students get A*s than Us. However, I am confident that, together with teachers and students, a Labour government will be able to reform the examination system to instead be one which assesses and grades students in a fair manner. (And also one which would be able to allocate grades in a year where exams end up being cancelled for whatever reason).

Sir LightningMinion KT CBE MSP is the Education Secretary”