That time of year approaches when we ritually sacrifice 40% of our 16-year-olds to mark them down as failures. Exam season is coming up – that summer rite when we sit down all the young, hunched over cramped desks day after day for weeks, to sit far too many GCSE papers. The ceremony has one great national purpose: to elevate the 60% who pass their crucial 5 GCSEs including maths and English to a superior destiny on a level 3 course and up – and to stamp down on the rest. Over two thirds of those failing to get that vital maths and English grade 4 are from families in the bottom fifth of incomes.
Then we force them through it again and again in resits most will fail again and again. Dividing the sheep from the goats is harsher after this government ordered everyone failing maths and English to keep resitting between the ages of 16 and 18: colleges and sixth forms lose their funding for any pupil who doesn’t keep resitting. Those hoping they were leaving behind schooling they failed (or that failed them), to escape into the green pastures of a further education college, perhaps for BTecs and City & Guilds qualifications, find they are forced to keep taking the English and maths GCSE medicine. Without grade 4, many courses are closed to them – whole vistas of new horizons, anything above level 2, however good they might be at, say, graphic design, cabinet making, gardening, art, caring, engineering or cooking. “Not everyone needs grade 4 English and maths,” says David Hughes, head of the Association of Colleges.
