Are grades and exams doing our children harm?
Last month, my eldest son left the school in which he had turned from being a boy into being a teenager, ready to embark on his next academic adventure. He is, as he recently remarked, currently school-less; waiting, poised between the old and the new. It’s an interesting moment to reflect – now that exams are done, speeches given, friends left behind – on what school is for, as Sammy Wright’s new book urges us to do.
Exam Nation is subtitled Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – And a Better Way to Think About School. In it, Wright, a teacher of 20 years’ standing, who previously sat on the Government’s Social Mobility Commission, covers not only exams and whether they’re the best way to assess our children (short answer: yes, despite their many flaws), but also the history of our education system, what school is really like – from the social world it creates to the turbulent time of our lives it spans – and how we could think differently about it and its purpose.
This is a dense, well-researched, compelling and thought-provoking book. You can tell that Wright is an excellent teacher. He’s also thoughtful, funny and self-interrogating, with has the classic weary cynicism of a teacher combined with optimism for the futures of the young people he encounters, which presumably is what made him want to go into the profession in the first place.
He paints a vivid picture of more recalcitrant pupils, complete with their smirks, swaggers and bloody-mindedness, and is honest about the challenges of teaching them. He acknowledges his ability to “pontificate freely about what we might do, without worrying about how, when or with what money”.
Yet despite the title, this isn’t a polemic. Rather, it’s a wide-ranging discussion about the essence of formal education, both deeply personal and universal. Wright argues that school should be more like a home than a factory, a community hub rather than a testing ground. While exams and grades are necessary, they do not equip children for adulthood. He argues, in fact, that they’re currently having the opposite effect.
In his conclusion, Wright sets out five new ways to think about school and how to implement them, from measurement being about improvement rather than ranking – with the removal of Key Stage 2 standard assessment tests (or Sats) and Ofsted split between safeguarding checks and more detailed “school monitoring inspections” by an assigned inspector who would come back year after year – to recognising the centrality of schools to communities and building that into their design.
He’s right about many things. Schools should do more than impart knowledge. Much of a teacher’s daily life consists of “interactions with young people that are not to do with teaching in any formal sense”. There is no clear-cut answer to what works and what doesn’t with “bad kids”. How a child feels about their school experience can have as much impact on outcomes as the grades they get. The transactional nature of education – what you put in, you’ll get out; get these grades and you’ll move up to the next level – doesn’t serve all children well.
Yes, Wright can be chippy about private schools (he writes of the “unintended benefits” should “our brightest Etonians go to America”), but he acknowledges both the privilege of his own private education and that his careful research into schools for his own children was as much an engineering of their environment as paying for it might have been. And yes, he is explicit about the flaws of our “exam nation”, that our obsession with grades results in narrow teaching to the test; that teaching becomes a zero-sum game; that “we end up with a system that prioritises good grades at the expense of a good education”. But liberals who want a Michael Gove-bashing screed will be disappointed.
Wright is dismissive, for instance, of some of the “progressive s---” advocated in his early days as a teacher, such as giving children a problem to solve before giving them the rules with which to solve it. He is admiring of the conservative techniques he observes at, among others, Katharine Birbalsingh’s strict Michaela Community School in London, with its “elaborate formality in how the kids talk to adults and routines of chanting and precisely defined table manners”.
He does all this even as he acknowledges “that tension between the contradictory impulses of teaching – between the pressure to learn content (facts, figures, dates, ‘the canon’) and the opening of space for thought; between the knowledge imparted and the experience felt; between the need to drive for success and the need to scaffold happiness; and between the impulse to control and the impulse to free”. He admits that he wants “to demand rigour and freedom, to say that life is messy and teaching doubly so”. And he makes the point that the best schools, however divergent they may seem, “have one key point in common… they all tell a story – and help their pupils tell a story – about the need for something that transcends the individual. They are communities… A good school is like a piece of performance art that allows children to be the hero of their own narrative.”
Above all, Wright is clear-eyed about the contradictions and complexities of the education system. In writing it, he has found himself “caught up in a kind of dizzying paralysis. Every time I think I see something clearly, my focus shifts and it seems to be part of a bigger pattern and I find myself disorientated again.” This is largely because at the system’s heart are human beings – teachers, pupils and their parents – with all their flaws.
And that’s what makes Exam Nation such a compelling read, no matter your outlook on our educational system, because the system is about people, not high-falutin’ educational theory, devised in boardrooms and not classrooms. As such, it will force any reader interested in education, with whatever their prejudices, to think about the experience of school, what it is for and who it is serving. And how, perhaps, we might make it better.
Exam Nation is published by Bodley Head at ￡22. To order your copy for ￡18.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
