Well, obviously! Who could reasonably say otherwise? But an almost-contemptuous yes risks glossing over the pre-eminent part that exam results play in the UK education system and jobs market.
School IS about so much more than exam results. Add your own points to my list of things that school is for. Some of these overlap:
- Building knowledge and skills – these are, of course, essentially the same thing
- Socialisation – learning how to get on with, and live well with, other people
- Enculturation – being exposed to ‘the best that has been thought and said’, and other key aspects of our culture
- Building character
- Providing new opportunities and experiences – some young people, at least, get things through school that they would never otherwise have – the opportunity to play a musical instrument, get involved in a school team and go on a school trip, for example
- Making a difference – many young people make good contributions to their community through their school life; for example, the charity and project work that many school students do
- Preparing us to be adults and good citizens
- Preparing us for work
So school provides children and young people with a rich and dynamic environment in which they can grow as individuals and as citizens of the world.
I worry that, as a society, we place too much emphasis on exam results – for example through school accountability measures and the grade entry requirements for further and higher education. And I wonder about whether the wider aspects of what makes us who we are as people could be somehow captured in a way that could be used as we seek to take our next steps – I know that the old school ‘Records of Achievement’ were an attempt to do that, but they never caught on and were dropped by the Government. I have no answer to this self-query that stands up to scrutiny.
A young person’s progress is at least as important as their attainment. Someone who works their socks off every day at school to get a Grade 4 in their English Language exam may well have made extraordinary progress to achieve it, and this deserves recognition.
But the ‘numbers on the doors’ – the actual exam grades – matter a lot. The vast majority of young people need grade qualifications for their next steps so they, and we at school, must keep doing our very best to maximise them – no one has a door shut to them by doing well, or better, in exams.
Exam results provide a kind of shorthand evidence of academic performance that is used as an indicator of a person’s ‘ability’ in school subjects. It is easy to capture GCSE grades in a certificate, and those grades can be used by young people as a passport into further and higher education, and employment. No doubt the system is flawed, and unfair to at least some, but it’s the world we live in at this time, so we need to keep encouraging, ‘Pushing’ and supporting our students to get the very best grades they can.
