Have we let exams become too important in shaping schools?

I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’

‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’.

Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed of their professionalism, were teaching physics GCSE, rather than physics, and Spanish A-level, rather than Spanish. Our schools were no longer teaching science and languages, but exam techniques. Genuine academic and independent learning was being sacrificed: ‘A-levels do absolutely nothing to encourage scholarship,’ said Mike Tomlinson, a previous chief inspector of schools.