I was delighted to read Polly Toynbee’s demolition of compulsory GCSE resits (How can we stop destroying the prospects of a generation? Scrapping compulsory GCSE resits will be a start, 24 August). Of course, level 2 qualifications in maths and English should be accessible to all school leavers who need them. However, the depressing treadmill of resitting resits is thin educational gruel and Michael Gove should be ashamed for espousing such a killjoy policy.
As a governor at a large further education college in Bedford, I find it depressing to receive data at every single board meeting focusing on GCSE resit results for thousands of students who “failed” maths and English just a few months previously. Speaking to students and staff, it is apparent that resitting exams is counterproductive. Compulsory GCSE resits are a negative learning experience, offering no reflection on how to improve. In most cases students merely fail again.
It does not have to be this way. The potential stepping-stone qualifications are a positive idea and lessons from the past need to be considered. I began my career teaching mature students (aged 17 to 70) GCSE English at evening classes in the 1980s. We did not force them to do the same course over and over. Rather, we offered “mature” syllabuses, avoiding the repetition of school failure and using more creative approaches to learning and assessment. It is no surprise that the number of those not in education, employment or training has risen in an age of compulsory resits.
John Butcher
Emeritus professor of inclusive teaching in higher education, The Open University
Polly Toynbee’s excellent article describes just how damaging our exam system has become. Failing the 11-plus in 1960, when only one boy from my large working-class West Yorkshire primary school class passed, negatively affected the rest of my life. I eventually got to university, but was unable to do a BA, which I wanted to do, because of a lack of an O-level foreign language – it was not taught at my school. I struggled through a BSc.
I subsequently had a career as a secondary school teacher and have been appalled by how Tory governments negatively affected the educational experience of students from the late 1980s, starting with the absurd “quart in a pint pot” Kenneth Baker national curriculum and marketisation of schooling. More recently, the manic Michael Gove “reforms” have destroyed local education authority control and accountability, wasted colossal amounts of money on “free schools” and academy chain bureaucracies, imposed a punitive inspection system, narrowed the 14-16 curriculum and turbocharged norm-referenced overassessment. All these changes have been driven by a nostalgia for a selective and academic elitist education that is unsuited to modern times.
The third of students unable to pass maths and English GCSE and condemned to the resit treadmill are victims of Tory arrogance and folly, and will feel this “failure” just as I did with the “stupid” (invoking Govian terminology) 11-plus for the rest of their lives.
Philip Wood
Kidlington, Oxfordshire
Polly Toynbee’s article should be read alongside Pete Crockett’s letter on the same date (Let’s focus on what people with special needs can do, rather than what they can’t, 24 August). Grades 1 to 3 are not “fails” for many students with additional needs – they are successes, built on the hard work of students, teachers and teaching assistants, often against the odds.
Ruth Eversley
Paulton, Somerset
