The timing of Sammy Wright’s book couldn’t be better. The landslide victory of a progressive party and the evisceration of a government that repeatedly used education as a political football should be a good moment for some serious soul-searching about the state of our schools.
His journey through the history of English education, its relationship to class, and our exam culture, meets that challenge. Peppered with anecdotes about young people he has met or taught in his 21-year career, it is rich in analysis of the current problem and in solutions, too. Sadly, it also shows the depth of our malaise and how unlikely any government is to have the stomach for the scale of the reform needed.
It starts at an important pivot point, the Covid pandemic. For the first time in generations, schools had to close and exams were cancelled. This stripped us of any meaningful way to judge individual or institutional success and laid bare the shallow judgements on which we currently rely.
Without exams, what was there to assess the effectiveness of a child’s whole school life? Teacher-assessed grades and the school’s recent performance were used to cobble something together. The results were shocking and left a trail of traumatised children and parents in their wake.
Covid also exposed an exam system designed to fit a pre-ordained distribution of grades, so that a certain proportion of young people must “fail” for others to succeed. This is a zero-sum game that tends to favour the better off.
Wright notices something that even an education nerd like me had failed to spot. The pandemic meant that we had to acknowledge the trauma of children being deprived of social interaction and forced to learn at home in often difficult circumstances.
Yet this is the reality for many in normal times. Pandemic or not, they are expected to compete with more privileged peers despite a history of social isolation, poverty or abuse.
In this context, schools are something of a miracle, says Wright. Filled with “care, commitment, skill and love”, they do more than simply impart knowledge. They forge social relationships, build character and identity and contribute to healthy communities, often requiring teachers to act as social workers and substitute parents.
And yet we reduce all this to ranking pupils in a narrow, competitive system which has lifelong consequences. What’s more, he writes, pupils know this and can see for themselves that it works fine for those at the top and less so for the rest.
What is the alternative? There is no suggestion that we should totally get rid of exams. They have a part to play in a rigorous education system but should not be the be-all and end-all. One suggestion is to replace subject GCSEs with a broader General Certificate of Secondary Education to include individual project work, assessment of maths and English in the context of other subjects, personal development, enrichment and work experience. This sounds suspiciously like a baccalaureate qualification that many other countries offer at 18, but would still be a radical move.
Wright has other ideas to make all schools more inclusive and suggests imposing more taxes on private schools to fund state investment, reforming Ofsted and providing more high-quality alternative provision for children facing exclusion.
But two datasets should act as flashing red lights for new ministers. The attainment gap between pupils from low-income families and their wealthier classmates stands at its widest since 2011, and school absence rates are stuck at a far higher level than before the pandemic. The contract between school and home has irretrievably broken down in some families, and schools are still often places where disadvantage is entrenched rather than challenged.
The new Labour government has some good, if modest, proposals for reform. But Wrights “deep fear that the system only speaks to the winners” makes it clear that we need to do so much more.
• Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School by Sammy Wright is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
