Teach climate change throughout the curriculum, reform school accountability and cut assessment burden, argues England’s largest exam board

Submission by AQA board to DfE's curriculum and assessment inquiry offers wide-ranging critique of set-up.

 

Climate change and sustainability should be taught across the curriculum, England’s largest exam board has argued, while key school accountability measures should also be drastically reformed and the number of assessments pupils take should be reduced.

These were arguments put forward by the AQA board, among a host of submissions to the government’s curriculum and assessment review, seen by Education Uncovered, which seem to be calling for a more radical overhaul of current arrangements than seems to be on the table.

Climate change

AQA’s submission to the review, whose interim report was published last month, and which drew on focus group work with 90 school leaders, teachers and exam officers as well as a student advisory group, argued that there was “growing demand for including sustainability and climate change in the national curriculum” with “climate change and sustainability [being] topics which many young people are passionate about”.

It added: “Going forward, AQA believes that climate change and sustainability should be embedded across the curriculum. Many young people are now more aware of and have an interest in learning about and understanding more on the impact of climate change and sustainability. Employers are also looking for the knowledge and skills needed for the green jobs of the future. So, it is important that the subject content in all subjects reflects this going forward. Climate change touches on multiple subject areas, and just as it impacts different aspects of our lives, so too should it be incorporated across different subjects.”

The submission highlighted work the exam board did to create new teaching resources to help teachers identify opportunities to explore climate change beyond science and geography, in citizenship, design technology, maths, psychology and religious studies. 

It seems an open question, currently, as to how much extra emphasis the new national curriculum will place on this. The curriculum and assessment review mentions the need for a “greater focus on sustainability and climate science,” but there is scant detail, and this is one of only two mentions of the word “climate” in the 44-page document.

Criticism of Progress 8 and EBacc measures

AQA also offered some scathing criticisms of both Progress 8, the metric which assesses schools’ value-added GCSE results, and the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) measure, both of which it argued have contributed to schools marginalising creative subjects.

The EBacc, which had been introduced under Michael Gove as Education Secretary in 2010, should be discontinued, it argued, “as it has not achieved its aims and has decreased creative subject uptake”.

AQA’s submission stated that “the curriculum students experience at secondary school has narrowed,” over an unspecified period. It added: “In some ways, the EBacc set out to encourage a core academic entitlement, with students having to study a language and history or geography. However, it has led not only to lower arts uptake but also to fewer secondary schools offering arts qualifications.”

Research had also found, said the submission, that the weighting of subjects within the Progress 8 value-added measure, in favour of traditional academic subjects within the EBacc, had also marginalised non-EBacc subjects.

It added: “We believe the Department [for Education] should discontinue the EBacc as a measure given the sharp decline in take up of arts and creative GCSEs. While it was intended to increase equity in the system by giving students a strong academic core, it has stripped creative and arts subjects out of the curriculum, subjects that can often ‘hook in’ students who can otherwise disengage.

“Progress 8 could be reformed to encourage greater breadth”. It could be replaced either with a “Progress 5” – in which there would  be two compulsory qualifications or “buckets”, covering English and maths and then complete freedom as to which other subjects counted; or a Progress 9 or 10, in which EBacc subjects could still be compulsory, but which would allow greater flexibility for others to be included as well.

The submission argued: “If you accept the argument that the EBacc buckets have driven down numbers taking creative and arts subjects, then logic might suggest that reversing this would counter this effect.”

The curriculum and assessment review’s interim report did not offer any firm conclusions as to the future of the EBacc and Progress 8 measures, though it seemed to give strong hints that the former’s position was under threat, with the measure having been noted widely in submissions to the review as a “barrier” to “achieving breadth and balance” at key stage 4, said the report.

Number of exams

Another “barrier” set out by the DfE review’s interim report in terms of the goal of achieving “breadth and balance at key stage 4” was the sheer number of exams, which the review report stated: “is reported to challenge adequate curriculum depth and to squeeze the curriculum time available for mandatory but non-assessed subjects such as PE, RE and RSHE”.

AQA appears to be in agreement, here. Perhaps remarkably for an organisation drawing on examination entry fees, its submission argued in favour of a reduction of the burden on students.

Its submission stated: “Overall, AQA believes the assessment burden is too high, and steps should be taken to reduce the number of end point exams. The Guardian reported that young people are taking potentially up to six hours of exams in a single day and spending up to seven hours a day revising for those exams. Today, the average GCSE student should expect to sit around 30 hours of exams in the summer series. We think a wider range of assessment methods and parallel qualifications could be used.”

The board said the review should investigate increasing the proportion of assessment within GCSEs which did not include exams, where this was already a feature, such as in GCSE dance, drama and design and technology. Some increased use in subjects not currently featuring it could also be investigated, via coursework which would be marked by exam boards rather than teachers, while simply cutting the number of exam papers in some subjects – GCSE foundation tier maths was mentioned – should be considered.

Diversity and inclusion

AQA was also one of a number of organisations to highlight issues of diversity and inclusion in the current national curriculum, which was last reformed under the Conservatives in 2013.

Its submission stated: “Children and young people deserve a curriculum which reflects modern Britain, so young people can see themselves represented and learn about the lives of others regardless of background, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, belief or disability. This is something teachers and students themselves ask us about often and is the right thing to do.

“A diverse curriculum should be pursued in a way that is meaningful and not tokenistic. The curriculum must strike the right balance between prescribed content to which all learners are entitled, appropriate volumes of course content, and teacher flexibility.”

AQA suggested that sometimes schools were not taking up existing flexibilities which would promote diversity and inclusion. It stated: “Despite having a range of texts by women on the specification, only 7% of students about novels or plays by a woman in our specifications because of teacher text choice. Despite our recent addition of works by three women of colour to our set text list in GCSE English Literature, most teachers of our specification deliver JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.”

In science, the submission added, there was also a “gender bias”. It said: “In the science content requirements [presumably at GCSE] set by the DfE, there is a gender bias towards men because the laws of science included in the curriculum are named after male scientists – for example, Newton’s laws of motion and Charles’ law of the behaviour of gases.

“Students need to appreciate and understand the breadth of the scientific community and how generally it is teams of scientists – often international teams – rather than individuals working on a research project or a discovery such as genome mapping or creating a vaccine for Covid. This of course includes contributions from female scientists, yet they are often not explicitly named.

“The science GCSE curriculum includes no named scientists, since the history of science was taken out when GCSEs were last reformed, with the exception of GCSE Physics, specifically the development of the atom, in which Niels Bohr and James Chadwick are mentioned. As for A-level, male scientists are mentioned but only in the context of being used as part of a law, a model, or a principle. Women like Rosalind Franklin and Marie Curie are not mentioned although there are sections that reference James Watson and Francis Crick. These are areas where updates to the science content requirements, and potentially other general qualifications, would be straightforward.”

Language organisations’ views on diversity and inclusion

AQA’s submission was one of 19 from “expert organisations” which have implications for “language education,” which have been analysed and summarised, in a document seen by Education Uncovered, by the organisations Committee for Linguistics in Education and Coalition for Language Education. These “expert organisations” range from those for English (the National Association for the Teaching of English [NATE] and the English Association) to those covering literacy, English as an additional language, modern languages, classics “and bodies with a wide cross-curricular brief for languages,” including AQA.

This document, entitled “Digest of Language-related Responses to the DfE Curriculum and Assessment Review 2024” also highlighted concerns about the current national curriculum failing to reflect the diversity of the modern UK.

It said: “There is…shared concern among stakeholders…that the current NC [national curriculum] and materials are not representative of contemporary society, and that texts often reflect a narrow, Eurocentric, and monolingual perspective.

“Multiple responses draw attention to the fact that the current curriculum fails to adequately reflect the diversity of modern Britain by not including authentic materials, culturally relevant themes, or diverse representation. There are widespread calls for a more inclusive curriculum, teaching and learning materials (e.g., Braille, intralingual subtitles), and assessments that focus on different skill sets… A shortage of teachers who reflect the diversity of the learner population is also noted ... Stakeholders argue that because many learners are not represented in the NC, teaching materials, or teacher demographics, they lack motivation, which impacts negatively on the UK’s creative and linguistics potential.”

Criticism of specific exams

A final point worth highlighting here, from AQA’s submission, and that of its rival, Pearson, as well as the summary of language-related submissions referred to above, relates to criticisms of particular subject exams.

AQA said that English Language GCSE “does not sufficiently enthuse and inspire students to continue studying English Language post-16 and there are significant drop-offs in uptake of English Language A-level and higher education…The narrow curriculum…has led to teaching to the test and so the subject has become too mechanistic. This leads to students becoming disengaged and demotivates teachers. Some of that is caused by reinstilling grammar that has been covered at KS2 [key stage 2], which is also mechanistic, and that then flows into English Language GCSE. Specification and texts need to match the modern world, assess oracy and include multi-modal texts.”

The “Digest…” document argued that “GCSE English Language is currently not fit for purpose”. The UK Literacy Association was quoted as having argued that there “should be a much clearer separation between language and literature, removing literature from the GCSE in English Language”. English GCSE exams more generally, said the document, were “narrow in scope, encourage teaching to the test [as argued by the organisations AQA, the English Association and NATE], do not guarantee basic literacy [AQA] and contain too much literature [English Association, UK Literacy Association].”

In a submission to the DfE review dated December last year, Pearson, which runs another of England’s major exam boards, also named several GCSE subjects whose content could be reduced. 

The government, it said, should “Address over-burdened GCSE curricula and reduce excessive content to help free up curriculum space and time. In particular, we believe there are opportunities to reduce excessive content in GCSE English, GCSE Sciences, GCSE Geography, GCSE History, GCSE Maths, and GCSE Design and Technology.”

The DfE should also “encourage the development of creative skills by reviewing and improving the curricula of creative subjects and some core subjects,” Pearson added.

Specifically on English, it said the DfE should: “Reform GCSE English as a priority. Our research and insights from teachers and learners highlight ongoing challenges with the current GCSE curriculum – and by association, the related curriculum at Key Stage 4 and earlier – which neither prepare students well for future study in the English disciplines nor for the workplace.”

It put forward “solutions” including “a broader range of literary text types and time periods, with a requirement for more diverse content”;  “a wider range of non-literary texts”; and “increased opportunities for creative engagement”.

The AQA board was identified as of 2022-23 by Ofqual as having comfortably the largest share of the qualifications “market” among the exam boards, awarding 34 per cent of all certificates for “regulated” qualifications that year, ahead of Pearson on 20 per cent, OCR exams on seven per cent and City and Guilds on five per cent. 

The curriculum and assessment review is due to publish its final report and recommendations in the autumn.