In the last week or so, news has been trickling in from clients who sat the final GCSE Latin exam on June 3rd. Everyone seemed pleased with the content, with no nasty surprises reported. Once again, it was relatively easy to predict the kinds of questions that would come up, as the papers are – broadly speaking – quite formulaic and unsurprising. This is perhaps to balance the fact that the content is so extremely difficult for candidates at GCSE level to cope with. The content is tough to learn, the exam itself is straightforward for candidates who have taken on the challenge, which broadly amounts to one long game of memorisation.
Given that we have a new government, who are currently doing a curriculum review, teachers are braced once again for GCSE reform. I find it difficult not to be horribly cynical about the whole thing, largely because I have been in education long enough to know that these so-called reforms usually amount to change for the sake of it, particularly in my subject. Since I started teaching in 1999, there have been multiple changes to the curriculum, none of which have made any tangible difference to its aims and outcomes, all of which have generated a pointless avalanche of work. As I started work in schools during my training year, GCSE reform was taking place, the first changes to the GCSE syllabus since its introduction in 1988. Those exams in my subject lasted only until 2003, when the exam was changed again, followed by yet further changes in 2010 and then again in 2018. According to this pattern we are thus due for further changes, yet the government has outlined no concrete plans for syllabus reform as yet.
There has been much general discussion about reducing the number of subjects, accompanied by the inevitable Gove-bashing, which remains the favourite sport of most educationalists of a political bent. Everybody joins in the fun, to tedious applause from the stands. There have also been the usual rumblings about “modernising” the curriculum, with talk of essential topics such as “sustainability”, “climate science” and “media and digital literacy”. This was reported on in March, when the government released an interim report on its curriculum review. Given that there has to be notice to make changes from the beginning of when the new syllabus would potentially be taught and that the course lasts two years, it doesn’t look like the GCSE exams will be changing all that soon, but change they will.
To illustrate the monumental pointlessness of these reforms, let’s take what changes OCR made to the Latin GCSE in 2018. The biggest change they made was to switch from 4 exams to 3, which was something of a blessing. In place of the two language exams, they reduced this to one, making it 50% of the total marks instead of two exams worth 25%. In a quite remarkable display of collective inertia, they more or less took the two prior exams and turned them into one, which will explain to younger teachers why the exam is divided into Section A and Section B, with the two halves having absolutely no content linking them: the current exam is quite literally two exams glued together. Yes, it’s that pathetic. In the literature, they did little to nothing more than switching around the 8 and 10 mark questions: the 8-marker used to be the mini-essay, the 10-marker used to be the extended style question, whereas now it’s the other way around. That was pretty much it. One other thing they did was to make it possible to study both verse or both prose texts, which to this day I suspect was actually an error on their part: the examinations for these options are scheduled on the same day at the same time, and I don’t think the exam Board would have actually planned it like that. Most schools, I think, don’t even realise that it’s possible: as a classroom teacher, I certainly didn’t, until it was pointed out to me by David Carter when I interviewed him for my podcast.
So, we wait with bated breath for the latest “reforms”, curious as to whether they will actually reform anything or whether they will be the usual pointless jiggling that necessitates nothing more than teachers getting their heads around a new set of criteria and re-writing all their resources in line with the new plan. No doubt the board will tweak the vocabulary list, offering teachers the exciting opportunity to edit every single quiz and every single test they have written, as well as to check every single resource that they have created in order to verify whether it includes any of the words that have been removed or added. I hate to be that person, but in all honesty – what is the point? The changes to date have always been immaterial, resulting in nothing but more work for an already-beleaguered profession, which is losing its members in droves. I fail to see how any of the impending changes are likely to be any different.
