Why next week’s resits show our assessment system is broken

Next week, thousands of 16 and 17 year-olds will resit their GCSE maths and/or English exams, having not secured a grade 4 or higher at the end of secondary school. Much has been said about the pressure this exam series places on schools and colleges: space for the exams whilst other lessons continue, staffing the invigilation of the exams, and the additional workload on teachers and leaders.

But the scale of this operation raises the more fundamental questions of why so many students are having to resit these exams and what impact – both positive and negative – doing so has on them. 

On the surface, the answer to the first question is straightforward. Roughly a third of students do not achieve at least a grade 4 – the so-called ‘standard-pass’ – in these subjects. This is a passport to further study and employment qualifications. Without a grade 4 in English and maths, this group (which ASCL calls the ‘forgotten third’) are excluded from multiple jobs including nursing, social work, and teaching. It is therefore a ‘condition of funding’ – to use the technical jargon – that schools and colleges make students who haven’t achieved these grades resit these exams.