Cut the number and length of GCSE exam papers to boost pupil wellbeing, says head of one of England’s big three exam boards

England's big three boards are now all calling for reductions in the number of exams pupils take.

 

Teenagers are spending too much time in the GCSE exam hall, the head of one of England’s largest exam boards has said – before setting out a plan in which the number and length of papers could be reduced.

All three of England’s mainstream school qualification exam boards are now calling for a reduction in exams, after OCR’s leader made her comments to MPs.

Education Uncovered also looked at what the government’s interim curriculum and assessment review said last month about the “assessment burden,” to gauge the prospects for change.

Jill Duffy, OCR’s chief executive, told members of the cross-party Commons Education Committee that the amount of time 16-year-olds spent in the exam hall was “far higher” than in most other countries, and suggested that cutting it would boost young people’s wellbeing. 

She said: “I think we have reached a point, actually, with assessment, you may think it’s unusual for the head of an exam board to say, where I think we have got too much assessment, too many exams going on at 16. We think we can do something about that.

“If you look at England at the moment, on average, a student is taking 30 hours of exams . That is far more than almost any other country and I think the research that we’ve done has shown that we could reduce that level of assessment without impacting on reliability and without impacting on standards.”

Ms Duffy then sketched out a plan which she suggested could reduce this burden.

She said: “A concrete thing you could do at GCSE would be to say that each GCSE could have a maximum of two papers – a lot of them have three at the moment- and those two papers could be a maximum of 90 minutes. If you did that, you would reduce the exam burden on average by about eight to 10 hours and you could do that without reducing the reliability of exams.

“That’s a concrete thing you could do in the assessment system that could have a concrete impact on wellbeing.”

Education Uncovered reported two weeks ago how England’s largest board, AQA, has also called for a reduction in the number of exams taken by 16-year-olds.

In a submission to the government’s curriculum and assessment review, which was the overall subject of the select committee’s evidence session yesterday, AQA said: “Overall, AQA believes the assessment burden is too high, and steps should be taken to reduce the number of end point exams.”

And, in its own submission to the curriculum and assessment review, last December, the Pearson board said the government should: “reduce the assessment and exam burden for students…reduce the volume of exam-based assessments that a student will face and facilitate a shift to more subject and purpose-specific assessment methods”.

Ms Duffy was responding to a question from the Liberal Democrat MP Caroline Voaden, which had asked whether schools should only be preparing pupils to do well in exams, or doing more to provide young people with the foundations to live happy, healthy and prosperous lives.

Ms Duffy indicated that reducing the exam burden was something concrete that could be done for young people, although she conceded that “as we all know, there are a multitude of factors that impact young people’s wellbeing today”.

Will the boards’ positions influence government?

It seems an open question as to whether the statements from the three boards will lead to change from the government, although Ms Duffy’s comments seem directly to address a question which was posed by the curriculum and assessment review’s interim report when it was published in March.

In it, the review team led by Professor Becky Francis of the Education Endowment Foundation said: “In our next phase of work, the Review will consider whether there are opportunities to reduce the overall volume of assessment at key stage 4 without compromising the reliability of results, and therefore the trust that stakeholders (from colleges and employers to parents and young people themselves) have in these qualifications.”

With Professor Francis and the review team pledging to take an “evolution not revolution” approach to curriculum and assessment reform, whether the government will end up being as radical as even the exam boards appear to want them to be is an interesting question. The review will publish its final report in the autumn.

EBacc comments

The review has left the way open for the scrapping of the English Baccalaureate qualification, which has come under criticism for allegedly narrowing the subject offer in schools – although another of the expert witnesses at yesterday’s Commons evidence session appeared cautious in terms of criticising it.

Tim Oates, group director of assessment research and development at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, who led the last curriculum review for the coalition government in the early 2010s, said that the EBacc had been launched with concerns including the need for more young people to take science at GCSE.

The qualification measure, he suggested, had helped to drive the numbers taking “triple science” – three GCSEs in physics, chemistry and biology, rather than the alternative of combined science, where pupils receive two GCSEs across the three subjects – from “six to eight per cent to 30 per cent”.

However, this was curious, as in fact the EBacc allows combined science as well as single/triple science. 

So it seems hard to see how the measure in itself would have driven that rise in GCSE single/triple science numbers.

Indeed, the high-profile Michaela Community School is listed as having 81 per cent of its pupils entered for the EBacc last year, though virtually all of them in recent years have taken combined, rather than single/triple, science (113 entered for double science in 2024, compared to only three entries each for biology, chemistry and physics).  

Ms Duffy told the MPs that the EBacc measure “has narrowed the curriculum for some students,” with varying effects across subjects, particularly within the creative and arts categories which are not included in the measure.

While art entries had held up, she said, drama and music had declined, to the extent that fewer than 50 per cent of schools “now enter even one student for GCSE music”.