Make the GCSE Work

 The publishing of the outcome of the proposed new GCSE consultation has left me feeling like Keir Starmer, with his oxymoronic, "Make Brexit Work". I will now have to Make the new GCSE Work. What might this mean?

The parallels between the new GCSE and Brexit are fun to explore, and cast light on our current situation and how to respond to it. Pushed through by a right wing "research" group claiming that their ideas were a solution to popular dissatisfactions back in 2016. That they would represent a fresh start, a wholesale new approach, a taking back of control.

Brexit was always going to be either painful or pointless. Painful if we gave up frictionless trade. Pointless if we remained in the Single Market but gave up our membership. Those were the choices. Deal or No Deal. And we ended up with a fudge that was both painful and pointless. The same applies with the new GCSE. Have the changes in response to consultation kept it as Painful or made it Pointless?

And how should we respond? After Brexit, should we try to have opt-ins to some of the benefits of membership? Should we try to continue to maintain good trading relations with the EU? Or does Brexit force us to adopt a different mentality: Scrapping for an advantage, a wheeler-dealer Britain acting in its own interests even when this means acting in bad faith? The same with the new GCSE. Can we stick to our principles because we believe they will still work in the new climate? Or do we need to fully swing behind the new orthodoxy if we want to survive in the dog eat dog world of exam results and accountability?

In order to summarise some aspects very quickly, I will link to other posts. And then move on to considering what I personally think are my choices in my school in order to Make the GCSE Work.

First of all, I think they have gone for the "Ugly Dog Statues" option. By tweaking the patently unworkable proposals to restrict vocabulary to the most high frequency words, they have pushed the rest of the proposals through.

In terms of their claims for Reading and Listening, I think that the proposals risk making the situation even worse. Their view of Reading and Listening as explicitly testing items of grammar and vocabulary, rather than comprehension of meaning, is precisely what makes the current papers so ridiculous. Having a defined vocabulary list might make the exams "easier", but as the same number of pupils will have to get questions wrong, then this will mean making the papers even tricksier. 

The compromises on Culture and topics won't become clear until we see what the exam boards come up with. Fundamentally though, this is about the content of the course, not how it is structured. The philosophy is still one of Phonics, Grammar and Vocabulary as the central pillars of teaching and learning.

And while some have claimed to see compromises around Communication, again we will have to wait and see what the exam boards come up with. But I am not hopeful. The scope for spontaneous interaction seems to be based on short exchanges in response to a text, some Role Plays and in response to a picture. Role Plays make me think of parrot-learning phrasebook style, with short responses. And short answers in response to texts or pictures doesn't fit with the way we teach pupils to improvise extended answers.

My biggest worry isn't just about having to abandon a focus on developing pupils' answers. It's not just the loss of Communication for its own sake that worries me. It is not even just about having to dismantle the whole literacy/oracy approach of working on coherence, development and spontaneity. It's a worry around the central process of language-learning. It's what building a repertoire and the ability to use it does for language-learning. Our curriculum is all about pupils having a core snowball of language that they can use. And more and more language sticks to that snowball. As I wrote here, this is what makes the difference between learning and language-learning:

I am very aware of the idea of a learner's "interlanguage". That they have an evolving conceptualisation of the language. Which is messy, partial, incomplete. Which evolves as they learn more and which can be called upon to express themselves. The alternative seems to be a collection of remembered structures and rules which if it isn't rolled up into a functioning proto-system, and remains as a set of discrete facts, isn't any sort of language at all.

I am very nervous of ending up with a curriculum that aims for an even covering of snow, with pupils memorising items without ever rolling it into a snowball. Or without having a core of the most important language that everything else can stick to. This is what teaching language as a working language offers over the alternative of teaching a language as an abstraction.

So to come to the question of Making the GCSE Work. I know from experience that sticking to your principles does not work. With the Controlled Assessment GCSE, continuing to teach pupils to speak spontaneously from a core repertoire of language did not work. What was rewarded was fancy language and large amounts of "information" learned off pat. With the opportunity for as many retakes as it took for a perfect recording.

This makes me think that it will not work to tweak our curriculum. We have to embrace the changes and the philosophy behind them. In my Keir Starmer role as head of department, how do I Make GCSE Work? This will inevitably be the topic of blog posts yet to come! Here are my first thoughts:

Is it possible to keep or tweak our KS3 and then swap to a Grammar and Vocabulary approach at GCSE? Possibly. But what is the point of teaching pupils in Year 8 to improvise extended answers if at GCSE there are other completely different hoops to jump through? It comes back to whether I think it's an important principle in language-learning. Or whether I now think that sticking to principles in a new climate is asking for trouble.

Will it be possible to keep Spanish? We currently start Spanish in Year 9 and make rapid progress based on pupils having a core repertoire of language they can deploy across topics. This "shortcut" actually turns out in practice to be very efficient in terms of helping their grammatical knowledge to crystalise and grow around the central kernel. With proportionally many more pupils going on to A Level Spanish than for French which they have studied since Year 7 or earlier. Again, prior experience tells us that through the period of the Controlled Assessment GCSE, teaching pupils a core repertoire to deploy spontaneously didn't get the results at GCSE, but did equip those pupils who went on to A Level to do better than schools who taught rote answers. But I am reluctant to get my fingers burnt again. If Making the New GCSE Work means abandoning our approach, then I am afraid it could mean abandoning Spanish. And the loss of a Sixth Form offering Spanish to the local area. This would be a tough decision to make, so watch this blog for developments...

Is it possible to mix and match? For example keeping our Year 7 based around communication - the French Art Exhibition, the French Café...? And our Year 8 based around a core repertoire of opinions, reasons, examples..? And then in Year 9 bring in a much higher focus on Grammar items and accuracy? This feels like a sudden change in direction at exactly the wrong time. We need to be able to continue to give pupils confidence that our KS3 leads directly to a successful KS4.

Is it possible to integrate NCELP materials with our existing course, or is it simpler to sweep away our curriculum and "buy into" the NCELP schemes of work from the start? Our snowball of language works because we make new language stick to what pupils already know and it expands their repertoire, taking time and practice to work on developing it to express themselves. The alternative, of having an even covering of snow, with a multiplicity of items to be learned and recalled, depends on incredibly intricate sequencing, interleaving and revisiting. The NCELP scheme of work, tracking how many times each vocabulary item is met in different texts and contexts, depends on meticulously detailed planning. I could not even start to make my own version and I wouldn't want to take it apart and rebuild it.

On the other hand, does something so precision engineered work in the real classroom? Every nerve in my body jangles at the idea of scrapping a curriculum which has evolved over decades in the real world, to replace it with something that works in the lab.

So, as the Brexit metaphor seems to have changed into one where the new curriculum has escaped from a research facility to infect us all, these are going to be my options: I don't think it is mild enough to ignore. Should I try to adapt to the new variant GCSE? Should I follow the official mandated approach? Or is it going to sweep away everything and a new curriculum will evolve in its place?