OCR’s 113-page report 'Striking the balance: A review of 11–16 curriculum and assessment in England', published on 9 September, is the latest contribution to the curriculum debate – adding to those from, for example, New Era Assessment (February 2022), the Times Education Commission (June 2022), Rethinking Assessment (January 2023), the House of Lords Education for 11-16 Olds Committee (December 2023) and EDSK (May 2024).
As would be expected, OCR’s document is articulate and persuasive, and it will doubtless feed into the Review of Curriculum and Assessment being led by UCL’s Professor Becky Francis. But it has two glaring errors of omission, for it fails to address two urgent and highly damaging problems: the unreliability of GCSE, AS and A level grades and the unfairness of the appeals system.
Unreliable grades – relegated to a footnote
The sole mention of the unreliability of grades is this footnote on page 20:
Ofqual is often quoted as saying that GCSEs are only accurate within one grade anyway. The truth is slightly more nuanced than that … The results showed that, for the GCE and GCSE units analysed, at least 89% of all candidates with a particular grade (other than the highest or lowest grade) have true scores either in that grade or immediately adjacent.
'Striking the balance' - OCR