The Government is under pressure from senior Tories to reform the GCSEs system and scrap the maths resit requirement after Thursday’s results showed the overwhelming majority of retakes had no success, again.
A source told i that ministers were contacted to raise concerns about the cycle of “endless resit failure” and were urged to ditch the system.
This year’s GCSE results showed that just 16.4 per cent of the 130,000 post-16 students forced to resit their maths exam in England achieved a grade 4, a standard pass equivalent to a C under the former grading system.
Even more will be going through the same cycle in 2024, as this year more than 180,000 Year 11s failed to get a grade 4 in their maths GCSE at the first attempt – nearly 40 per cent of the total who took the exam.
Pupils that fail English and maths GCSEs are required to retake the papers until they either get a grade 4 pass or turn 18. But experts have slammed the system as consigning students to a “carousel” of resit misery, with most pupils failing again and again.
Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, called on the Government to overhaul the current system, which he said was failing young people across the country.
“It’s a national tragedy that so many teenagers are failing to achieve basic standards after 12 years of schooling. Successive governments have failed to address one of education’s biggest scandals,” he told i.
“We need to consider whether to introduce a basic school certificate of functional skills that every pupil is expected to pass. What’s for sure is that the current approach isn’t working.”
