Examination of Witnesses (Questions 173
- 179)
MONDAY 21 JANUARY 2008
DR ANDREW
BIRD, MURRAY
BUTCHER, JERRY
JARVIS AND
GREG WATSON
Q173 Chairman: May I welcome our
witnesses to this session of the Children, Schools and Families
Committee? We are very pleased to have such a talented group of
experts with us this afternoon and we hope to learn a lot from
them. As we have at least six sections to cover, I hope that you
will not mind if we cut a section to move on to the next. We really
could spend a couple of hours on each section. Sometimes I will
rather rudely say, "Quick questions and quick answers."
Do not get upset about that. Will you all introduce yourselves?
We have your CVs, so there is no need for you to say anything
about them. Starting with Andrew, have you any one thought that
you would like to raise before we start the questions and answers?
Dr. Bird: I am Andrew Bird from
the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance. I take it that you
are looking for an opening statement from us?
Chairman: It depends how long your opening
statement is.
Dr. Bird: A minute.
Chairman: You can have a minute. Before
you came in, I was saying to my colleagues that you used to do
a really useful job in a fantastic chemical company in Huddersfield.
Dr. Bird: That was a few years
ago.
Chairman: They did not believe that I
was going to say that. Andrew, you are very welcome. Please give
me your minute.
Dr. Bird: First, AQA is an independent
charity. The board of trustees is drawn from the teaching profession,
higher education and business. Our one purpose is to "do
good in education". We aim to discharge that by giving high
quality qualifications in respect of teachers, parents, employers
and HE, by delivering new qualifications and modes of assessment
that meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's learners, by providing
the best level of training support to teachers who deliver our
specifications, and by carrying out and publishing research into
educational assessment. May I draw your attention to a couple
of points that we raised in our written evidence, and then two
that have arisen since? The first one, drawn from our written
evidence, concerns functional skills and hurdles for GCSE. The
policy intention is to impose a functional skills hurdle at Level
2 of GCSE on English, maths and ICT. On considering our research,
we are concerned that when it is introduced, it will de facto
be a change of standard. From our modelling work, it will suppress
the pass rate for A to C at GCSE. The policy position is that
making such things explicit will lead to more discreet, direct
teaching of those skills and, hence, a rise in performance. That
might be true, but we need to consider the policy implications
of that. We have no problem with raising the standard. In fact,
we think that that is a good idea, providing that we understand
it and we all know what will happen as a consequence of that at
the transition point. Secondly, throughout our evidence, we are
quite keen on diversity of provision: giving the choice to teachers
and advisers to give students the widest range of curriculum opportunities.
It is important to remember that only a small number of our students
do three A-levels. Many do one or two A-levels, and they would
find the Diploma to be too much at Level 3. Diversity of providers—meaning
people such as ourselves—drive competition in service delivery
and support, which, we believe, helps innovation. Evidence from
contractual models suggests that, in so doing, the Qualifications
and Curriculum Authority drives out innovation. I also want to
raise two items that are drawn from the more recent past. Clearly,
we welcome the Government's intention to separate the regulator.
As we mentioned that in our written evidence, we cannot do anything
else at this stage. However, we want to draw two points to your
attention. One is the need for a willingness to co-ordinate and
integrate regulation across the three countries of England, Wales
and Northern Ireland. There is a de facto single market in qualifications
but, as you will be aware, the policy position in those countries
is diverging. Therefore, from a regulatory point of view, there
needs to be a bringing together of regulation. We are also concerned
that as the shadow regulator—sorry, it is the interim regulator
at this stage, I am told. As that process has got under way, the
focus has seemed to be mainly on picking a new name for it, rather
than considering the technical capability and capacity it requires
to be an effective regulator. We are concerned that the result
will be a stifling, box-ticking bureaucracy, rather than a strategic
regulator of our activities. Finally, we think there is an emerging
dilemma between two terms that we hear a lot from the Government
and regulator. This is the whole high-stakes environment versus
light-touch regulation. We obviously welcome appropriate and sensible
regulation that aligns to the five principles, but we see the
intention to extend the availability of qualifications from colleges
and workplaces and, in those situations, encourage light-touch
regulation—which one can understand to help people enter
the market and to ensure that those qualifications are acquired
and certificated—as working against those qualifications
being portable and having utility. If regulation is only light
touch, it is in danger of not meeting the standard of regulation
that the high-stakes qualifications are put under. Qualifications
need to command respect, and not just from the initial provider
of those qualifications. Thank you, Chairman.
Chairman: I let you get away with that
even though it took more than a minute.
Murray Butcher: Good afternoon.
Thank you for inviting me. I am Murray Butcher, director of assessment
and quality at City & Guilds, which is the UK's largest vocational
awarding body. Established in 1878, it received a royal charter
from Queen Victoria in 1900. We provide about 500 vocational qualifications
in diverse occupational areas, ranging from agriculture to zoo
keeping. City & Guilds currently comprises four qualification
brands: the City & Guilds, which is the wide range of vocational
qualifications; the Institute of Leadership and Management, which
covers first-line management and beyond; the Hospitality Awarding
Body, which relates primarily to hotel and catering qualifications;
and the National Proficiency Tests Council, which covers all our
land-based awards. We operate in the UK and internationally, covering
about 100 countries and working through about 8,000 centres. A
centre can be a school, college, university, training provider
or employer. I will seek to make any other points I can during
the general questioning.
Chairman: Fine.
Jerry Jarvis: Good afternoon,
ladies and gentlemen. I will be brief. I am Managing Director
of Edexcel, which is a Pearson company. We are known principally
for our technology. The only thing I would like to say in an opening
statement is how struck I was by what Ken Boston said in his evidence
on 17 December. He picked up three key issues that he said were
critical in improving attainment in this country. First was the
provision of personalised learning; the second was the provision
of continuous analytical testing and evaluation; and the third
was the professional training of teachers. We strongly endorse
that view. We also believe that those three factors are the issues
that would most quickly improve attainment in this country, and
we have invested massively in the provision of a framework to
do that. Like my colleagues, I am very pleased to participate
in this inquiry and I look forward to the recommendations and
the outcome.
Chairman: Thank you.
Greg Watson: Good afternoon. I
am Greg Watson, the Chief Executive of OCR—Oxford, Cambridge
and RSA Examinations, to give it its full title. We are a major
UK awarding body that principally makes qualification awards to
14 to 19-year-olds in schools and colleges. We are exactly 150
years old and a not-for-profit social enterprise. For a century
and a half, we have developed assessments of various types to
structure, motivate and reward learning. We are a member of the
Cambridge Assessment Group, which is a well known international
education group that operates in more than 150 countries. In many
of those countries, it offers assessments similar to the style
of assessment that we have here in the UK. In the past 10 years
there have been three developments of note, which perhaps we shall
have an opportunity to explore in this inquiry. The first is a
growing use of qualifications as a public policy lever, and with
that a widening of the uses to which assessment is put beyond
the original purpose of structuring, motivating and rewarding
learning. I am thinking of uses such as measuring school performance.
Secondly, there has been more frequent change at both the system-wide
level and that of individual qualifications, and some short-circuiting
of long-established disciplines of evaluation and research based
on hard evidence. Thirdly, and connected with the previous two,
there has been an imperceptible but worrying loss of public confidence
and a feeling that somehow things are not quite what they used
to be. That concern has become harder to deal with because of
the many uses to which assessment and qualifications have been
put and the difficulty of explaining and assessing the impact
of change. We very much welcome the Secretary of State's announcement
before Christmas that a new independent exams regulator will be
created. We see in that a once-in-a-generation opportunity to
deal with the three issues that I have mentioned and to put the
exams system in a position of being seen to be sufficiently independent
while commanding public confidence, and for the regulator to have
a key role in balancing the desire to innovate and keep pace with
society with a desire to maintain stability and integrity over
time.
Q174 Chairman: Thank you very much
for those openers. May I open the questioning by asking Jerry
Jarvis something? I shall start with him, as he is in the middle.
People used to say that the trouble with our examinations was
that we had a number of boards, and that what we needed was one
big board that did everything. That would stop competition and
prevent people from switching from one examining board to another,
and everything would be a lot tidier if one board did the job
that the four of you do. Is that not an unanswerable proposition?
Jerry Jarvis: Inevitably, I have
a personal view. I spent a long career outside education before
coming into it, and I am used to competition being used to drive
up standards and reduce costs. My observation is that we benefit
massively from having competition in the marketplace. The huge
majority of teachers who choose the specifications of examination
systems tell us that they value the choice that they have. That
choice certainly makes me compete strongly with the colleagues
who are sat beside me. Without it, we would not have the degree
of ingenuity, purpose and lead that we have in this country, nor
the stability and reliability. Competition has been very good
for education.
Q175 Chairman: What if a teacher
or head teacher said to you that the danger of competition between
examination boards is that everybody knows that if you are being
pushed and pushed to raise standards and raise the number of people
getting grades A to C and so on at GCSE, A-level and other levels,
people go for the easiest pass? Reputations go around, and people
say, "It is easier to take English at GCSE or A-level with
that board," and they switch around. If you are really going
to compete, you will just become known as the easiest board from
which to get qualifications so that you can wipe out the other
three.
Jerry Jarvis: That is a popular
view, but it is generally not held up by fact. I am one of three
accountable officers in this country. I am responsible for ensuring
that each award made by Edexcel is made under strict scrutiny
and that the standard is maintained across time and in comparison
with other awards. I do not have the ability to interfere with
that standard. If you look at the appearance of so-called easy
qualifications, the arguments tend to break down when you get
into some of the detail. For example, the pass rate in GCSE maths
is higher than the pass rate in media. Does that mean that maths
is easier than media? Because of choice, these days, students
will take the qualifications that they enjoy and are good at.
Ken Boston put it eloquently when he drew the difference between
the standard that is the hurdle that students must achieve, and
the standard that is expressed as the number of students who have
actually achieved that standard. We do not and cannot compete
by producing easy qualifications.
Q176 Chairman: Why then, Greg, are
so many people and parents out there, let alone the poor old editor
of the Daily Mail, unhappy and feeling that standards have
gone down and that kids do not work as hard or get qualifications
of the same standard as when they were at school? Why is there
a general feeling that things ain't what they used to be?
Greg Watson: Let me offer two
possibilities. First, qualifications have changed and evolved.
The A-levels that young people sit today are not the same as those
I sat, with good reason. The need for the routine replaying of
a large body of knowledge has probably weakened slightly as access
to information has become easier. On the other hand, industry
says that it wants people who are more skilled in using that information—in
applying it and being able to think for themselves. In A-level,
we have seen a shift over time so that the body of knowledge in
any given subject is probably a bit smaller, but the skills needed
to apply that knowledge have moved to a slightly higher level
of demand. Some of the commentary is simply an unfamiliarity with
how the qualifications have changed—they do not feel the
same. Secondly, I think that there is a misunderstanding about
the nature of competition among the people sat at this table.
Ours is a competition of not standards, but ideas. Because we
are all independent organisations, because we are all close to
the business of teaching and learning, and because we find ourselves
between schools and colleges on one hand and universities and
employers on the other, I think that we feel driven to look for
new approaches. Look at what has happened with GCSE science recently.
There has been a real rejuvenation of science in the classroom
because of a particularly innovative programme that we at OCR
have developed in partnership with the Nuffield Foundation. Look
at what is happening with geography at the moment. We are running
a groundbreaking pilot with a different approach to geography
that reconnects the concepts of geography with a study of the
real world. That helps young people to make more sense of the
subject. One reason why we have a 150-year tradition in this country
that so many other countries overseas want to buy into is that
we have had the power to innovate and a competition of ideas and
subjects. They have helped us to keep subjects fresh and interesting
and to offer different approaches to different young people who
want to learn in different styles.
Q177 Chairman: Andrew, you are a
scientist by training, are you not? Why do people say that people
are shifting to what are perceived as easier subjects? We are
still having difficulty in attracting enough people to carry on
with maths, physics and the sciences in general. Even geography
seems to be losing students, despite the new course that Greg
Watson has just described to us. With what you are providing,
are you not colluding to stimulate movement away from the hard
scientific subjects to subjects that are perceived to be easier?
Dr. Bird: Perception is everything,
is it not? We are trying to reflect those things that students
want to study that are relevant to commerce and work today. Media
studies qualifications meet a student need, and teachers feel
that students would enjoy learning it. Through it, students can
collect important basic study skills and skills for future employment.
Is that easier than science? I did French and science at school
and found the former incredibly hard. Was the French exam easier
than the science exam? It was much harder for me, because of my
ability. People find what they enjoy easier, so I found maths
quite straightforward, whereas other people find it very difficult.
A lot of this is about perception. We work extraordinarily hard
to ensure that the level of demand among subjects is maintained
over time, and we do that by using experts in the classroom and
expert examiners—people who are knowledgeable about their
subject. We cannot undo the perception of, "Well, it is not
what I was taught at school"— nor should it be, because
times, demand and needs have moved on—"and I cannot
connect with or understand it, so I do not appreciate that it
is as difficult as, say, physics."
Chairman: Right, I have warmed you up.
Murray, you will have to wait for a moment, because people will
get testy if I carry on. Now we will drill down a bit, and John
Heppell will lead us.
Mr. Heppell: Sharon can go first because
she has to leave.
Chairman: Sorry, Sharon, you are next.
They have switched; they have done a secret deal.
Q178 Mrs. Hodgson: I want to ask
a couple of quick questions and then go, because I am due in the
Chamber on Bench duty. I want to talk about evidence that we received
from Professor Dylan Wiliam, who argues that although A-levels
have not necessarily become easier, examinations no longer measure
what they used to. From that, he infers that a pupil achieving
a top grade does not necessarily have the same skills as a pupil
who achieved a top grade years ago. How are the gatekeepers to
further and higher education, and employers, to compare students
in similar subjects, but from different years, given the changes
in qualifications?
Jerry Jarvis: Our examination
system is complicated and driven by populism. It is actually very
difficult to compare an A-level taken in 2007 with one taken pre-Curriculum
2000. The structure is different, and we are examining different
things. Access to A-level education was different some 10, 15
and 20 years ago, so the cohort taking those examinations was
also different. However, we can perhaps see a continuing thread
through the regulator's work in attempting to maintain a standard
in A-levels over the years. Truly speaking, however, we can compare
precisely only A-levels that were taken since the introduction
of Curriculum 2000. I shall return to the mantra that I am sure
that you will hear time and again when speaking to anyone from
an examination board or awarding body: we have attempted to maintain
the hurdle at the same height, even though the features that we
are examining are different. What has changed quite dramatically
is access. There is far more choice, so, for example, students
can take a number of AS-level examinations and continue the AS-level
studies that they are best at. There is multiple access to resits,
modular variants, and so on, which have increased the probability
of students attaining that same fixed standard. There is a very
difficult notion to get across, so it is easy to say, "When
I did A-levels, they were much harder." Our students work
very hard for A-levels today, and something in the region of only
3% of 18-year-olds achieve three A grades.
Q179 Mrs. Hodgson: If you are saying
that standards have been maintained and the hurdle is still at
the same height, how can you counter the claims by some universities
that school leavers entering the first year do not have the same
depth of knowledge that students with the same grades had years
ago? The universities are saying that.
Greg Watson: I think that you
have to bear in mind that the role of A-levels in the education
system has changed over time. There was a time when A-levels were
purely for those entering higher education and they were actually
offered to a pretty small part of the 17 and 18-year-old age group.
A-levels moved over time to become the standard school-leaving
qualification, in many ways, and that will be even more the case
if the rate of those staying on to 18 continues to rise. As A-levels
have evolved, there has inevitably been a trade-off between ensuring
that the qualification is suitably motivating and providing the
right structure for learning for a wide range of young people,
and making sure that it is a good basis for university entrance.
I would recognise that, in the drive to widen the use of A-levels,
we have lost a little, and that is why we have come back and started
to look at the stretching of the upper end of A-levels to make
sure that we reintroduce a little more stretch for the most able
exam candidates and give some universities more of an ability
to see who the most able are. We should also draw a distinction
between the year on year reliability of standards and the long
progress of the history of standards. Year on year, all of us
at this table go to great lengths—in fact, the QCA's independent
review last year said that we go to greater lengths in this country
than anywhere—to guard standards in our subjects. What Jerry
said was right. Over the decades, we have seen a number of structural
changes, which have all been there for a good reason, but we have
lacked an independent assessment of the impact of those changes.
As I said in my opening remarks, I see it as a positive development
that the Secretary of State wants to put the regulator some distance
from the Government of the day and Ministers. One role that the
regulator will be able to play will be to look at change in the
system, to evaluate the impact that any change might have on standards
and public perceptions, and to see whether we are happy to make
a trade-off for the benefit that we get from making that change.
That will be very welcome.
Chairman: Sharon, have you finished?
Mrs. Hodgson: Yes. That is great. Thank
you.
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