Blighted by high-stress, high-stakes assessment
Our education system boasts numerous strengths, including exceptional teachers, innovative leaders and outstanding schools and colleges that provide high-quality academic training and support for their pupils and students year after year.
However, despite these strengths, there remain significant challenges. Too many young people, particularly those at the lower end of the attainment spectrum, are not given the opportunity to leave school with a comprehensive record of their successes and achievements, regardless of their efforts. Often, young people’s educational journeys are narrowly defined by a collection of exam results, typically in a limited range of subjects, with insufficient emphasis on technical education, creative learning and personal development.
Too much emphasis is placed on the results that students attain in examinations at artificially fixed points in their lives which bear no relationship to their level of maturity. Our education system is blighted by high-stress, high-stakes assessments at the end of Year 11 which get in the way of educational development and have more to do with grading schools than they do with assessing students. No other major European country has a similar break in the flow of education at this time – it is a relic of a bygone age which needs to be ditched.
The vision for a National Baccalaureate
We believe that a successful education encompasses far more than exam results. As members of the National Baccalaureate Trust, we have been working since 2015 to design an innovative new type of leavers’ award for students in English schools and colleges. This award aims to recognise all aspects of young people’s achievements, including academic and technical qualifications, as well as their participation in the arts, sports and civic activities.
Our Baccalaureate model has three elements: core learning; a research project and a personal development programme, and it can be run over two years in any Key Stage. For more detail on this, see our 2022 National Baccalaureate Trust Proposal document.