School Accountability, Qualifications and Curriculum Reform

Written evidence submitted by the Department for Education

Information for the select committee, following its 15 May session on school accountability, qualifications and curriculum reform

Evidence in support of GCSE reform closing the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers

  The GCSE reforms that the Government is introducing will ensure that all pupils are provided with the opportunity to succeed and that the performance they are expected to demonstrate is on a par with their peers in the highest performing jurisdictions. Pupils taking the reformed GCSEs will have studied a rich and rigorous curriculum, and all pupils, regardless of any socio-economic disadvantage, will have the opportunity to develop deep knowledge and understanding. It should not be the case that this is a privilege of more advantaged pupils, who tend to have exposure to a wider range of academic experiences both in and out of school.

The higher expectations of attainment in reformed GCSEs will drive and influence teaching and learning. The reforms we are making across education, for example support for disadvantaged pupils through the Pupil Premium, the introduction of the new National Curriculum, changes to how schools are held accountable, and policies designed to improve teacher quality will support this ambition and lead to improvements in teaching and learning so that pupil performance will rise to meet the new higher standard. Many of these policies have a particular focus on the most disadvantaged pupils.

Furthermore, a culture of high expectations is one of several consistent factors essential to high pupil attainment and good progress. Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, has said that a common factor in high performing systems is "the belief in the possibilities for all children to achieve" and there is evidence that suggests that with the right teaching and learning pupils will benefit from those higher expectations (Ofsted, 2009; OECD, 2010). This is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils, who can sometimes experience lower expectations of performance regardless of their academic ability.

The OECD [1] has found that teachers tend to give socio-economically advantaged pupils better school marks, even if they don’t have better performance, than socio-economically disadvantaged pupils. PISA found that schools and teachers systematically reward certain student characteristics that are unrelated to learning. Even after accounting for students’ reading proficiency, study habits and attitudes towards school and learning, in all countries studied, socio-economically advantaged pupils received higher marks than their peers. For this reason, increasing the emphasis on externally marked examinations will disproportionately benefit pupils from poorer backgrounds by removing the influence of these assumptions.

The research of Clarke, Taverner and Wright [2] , which finds that certain skills essential for success may develop progressively throughout a course, provides powerful arguments for linear assessment, and that this can be particularly beneficial for disadvantaged pupils. It is a common assumption that disadvantaged pupils benefit from breaking a course down into modules and allowing them to take these modules in bite-sized chunks. However, this research suggests that allowing these pupils more time to develop the intellectual maturity required to do well in examinations could help to close the attainment gap currently seen between disadvantaged and other pupils. Ofqual’s comparison of candidate achievement in modular and linear assessments found evidence that lower attaining pupils do better in linear mathematics exams, providing further evidence in support of linear assessment as a means of closing the attainment gap [3] .

Finally, the introduction of the English Baccalaureate performance measure has increased the take up of study for core academic subjects generally, but its effect is especially marked for poorer pupils. A survey commissioned the Department [4] found that in 2010, 10 per cent of pupils in schools with a high proportion of children eligible for Free School Meals were taking a combination of subjects that could have led to the English Baccalaureate. 41 per cent of pupils in these schools started studying the set of key subjects from September 2012 – a 310 per cent increase. The rise over the same period in schools with a low proportion of students eligible for Free School Meals is 54 per cent.

Design and Technology

Craig Whittaker asked "how much input has the D and T Association had into what will come out shortly"?

We have been working closely with the D and T Association on revising the published draft. They, and the Royal Academy of Engineers, were asked by the department to lead on the development of a revised version of design and technology curriculum. Their draft was used as the basis for discussion at the design and technology roundtable event on 29 April, which included representatives from a wide range of industry and other organisations. The D and T Association and RAEng are refining the draft as result of the roundtable discussions, with input from a range of organisations with an interest in the subject. This will ensure that the new curriculum embodies the coherence and conceptual rigour of a modern technological education whilst retaining the breadth of industrial and domestic applications that the subject should cover.