I always thought that rugby was invented so that there was no chance of public schoolboys having to meet grotty kids from football-playing state schools on the playing fields. But until recently all children, whether in the state or independent sector, did at least take the same exams. Until, that is, there emerged a great divide between GCSE and IGCSE.
In January, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan confirmed that international GCSEs, or IGCSEs, will no longer be counted in school performance tables once the first reformed GCSEs start to be taken in 2017. The new courses, like IGCSEs, will be examined at the end of the course, not in modular instalments. The move, which reverses a decision by her predecessor, Michael Gove, is the latest instalment of a long saga which has driven a wedge between the state and independent sectors.
GCSEs, introduced in the late 1980s, had long been criticised for their modular structure and for the large amount of coursework they involve. A decade ago some independent schools decided to do something about it. They noticed that the IGSCEs still offered by examination boards for the benefit of English-language schools abroad had retained the structure of the old O-level: pupils were taught for two years and then examined at the end. Moreover, they discovered that your school didn’t have to be abroad to be able to offer the exam.
There was one problem, or maybe it wasn’t a problem at all. The exam performance tables produced by the Department for Education failed to recognise the IGCSE, with the result that schools taking them would appear at the bottom of the tables, with a score of zero. Highly selective independent schools sank below the worst-performing comprehensives. Independent schools could enjoy the marketing benefit of offering a ‘more rigorous’ exam — while simultaneously not having to compete with state schools in the league tables. An appearance at the bottom of the tables came to be worn as a badge of pride: far better that your £30,000-a-year school is a principled outcast than appears sort of near the top of the league tables but embarrassingly below a few state comprehensives.
In one of his first moves after becoming Education Secretary in 2010, Gove decided that IGCSEs would count towards the league tables, and encouraged state schools to take them too. He perhaps imagined that grammar schools plus a few academies and free schools would rise to his invitation, risking a fall in grades for the higher purpose of subjecting pupils to greater intellectual challenge.
Gove’s initiative went well. Too well, in fact. By 2013, state schools were switching to the IGCSE in droves. That year, entries for IGSCE English soared from 18,000 to 78,000. Trouble was, they weren’t doing it to give their pupils a greater challenge but rather for the opposite reason. State school teachers conversing on the discussion boards of the TES were adamant that far from being more rigorous, the IGCSE in English language was ‘super-easy’ and an ‘absolute doddle’. While the comments referred only to the English language exam, this did unquestionably damage the IGCSE brand. Morgan’s reasoning for kicking IGCSEs out of the league tables again is that she claims they may be less rigorous than the revamped GCSE, as exam boards tout for business and some teachers hunt for whatever exam will flatter their pass rate.
But then that potentially takes us back to the situation we were in before: a divided exam system, with many independent schools disappearing off the performance tables. So will independent schools make the switch?
Three quarters of pupils in their GCSE year at independent schools this year will take at least one IGCSE. One per cent will take nothing but IGCSEs. Morgan shouldn’t count on that changing all that much, and on her new GCSE becoming the ‘gold standard’, as she hopes. Of the three new GCSE courses being introduced this autumn, for example, pupils at Cheltenham College will be taking just one, English Language.
‘The new English language GCSE is a huge improvement,’ says Duncan Byrne, deputy head. ‘But we want to continue to offer the best exam and we will continue to take English literature and maths as an IGCSE. The official league tables are not terribly important to our parents, who are more interested in the league tables compiled by the newspapers.’ One man’s ‘gold standard’, in other words, is another man’s brass. The ‘I’ before your school qualifications will go back to meaning that you have attended an independent school. The worthy aim of trying to reduce the divide between state and private education is unlikely to be fulfilled.
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