This blog post is based on an article originally published on LinkedIn on 16 August 2020 – click here to read in full.

The fallout from A-level and GCSE results will be uncomfortable for government and upsetting and challenging for teachers and students alike. Arguments over whether this year’s results are robust and fair miss one key issue.

Put simply: "Has the exam system in England ever been robust and fair for individual pupils?"

For those of us who did well in exams and whose children also did well, it is too easy to be confident. Accepting that our success and others’ failure is a systemic problem, not a result of competence and capability, is not easy.

Let me be clear: I do not have confidence in the exam system in England as a measure either of success or capability. 

[…] Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine that I gave an exam paper submission to 100 examiners. Let me assume that it "objectively" is a C grade.

Would all 100 examiners give it a C? If not, what is the spread? Is the spread the same for English literature, physics and geography, as just three examples? If you cannot provide clear evidenced answers to these questions, how can you be confident that the system is objective?

If we look at the examiners, the same challenge appears. Are all examiners equally consistent in their marking, or do some tend to mark up or down? Where is the evidence, reviewed and published to demonstrate robustness?

We also know that the month you are born still has an effect on GCSE grades. What is robust about that?

[…] I have known children who have missed out on grades after divorce, separation and death of parents, siblings and pets. I cannot objectively give a measure of the impact, but then neither can the exam system. I would add that I suspect a classmate of mine missed out because of hayfever. Children with health issues such as leukaemia and asthma whose schooling is disrupted have had their grades affected every year, not just this one.

So, the high stakes exam system is, for me, a winner-takes-all loaded gun embedding inequality and privilege in the outcomes.

Can we do better? Well, if we want to use exams, then each paper needs to be marked by say five independent assessors. If they all agree on a "B" then that is a measure of confidence. This is often a model used for assessing loans, grants and investments in businesses. It does not guarantee success of course, but what it does is reduce reliance on potentially biased individuals. If I was an examiner and woke up today in a foul mood, would I mark a paper the same today as yesterday? I would not bet on it.

The really interesting cases in my experience are where you get 2As, a C and 2Ds, for instance. In my experience, I've seen it more often in "creative subjects", but some non-traditional thinkers in subjects like mathematics (a highly creative discipline, by the way) often don't fit the narrow models of assessment of our exam system. The problem with this example of bringing people together to try get a consensus on a "B" is that it eliminates the value that comes from the diverse views and the richness of the different perceptions.

So, for me, for a system to be robust it has to have more than one measure to allow the individual, parents, universities, FE and employers access to a richer view of an individual. If someone got an ABBCD in English that is as interesting as someone who got straight Bs. 

[…] There are already models that command respect in grading skill levels. Parents are quite happy if a child is doing grade 6 piano and grade 2 flute at the same time. They are quite happy for a child to sit when ready and have the chance to resit. Yet in the school setting the pressure is there for a child to be at level 8 say for all subjects. That puts unnecessary pressure on pupils, teachers and schools.

Imagine how society would react if you could only take the driving test once at 17 and barriers were raised to stop you retaking it.

[…] This year’s bizarre algorithmic system is not robust, but then we have never had a robust system as far as I am concerned. Let's open our eyes and build something that we should have more confidence in. Carpe diem.

Join the discussion: share your views in the comments below (member login required).

Charlotte Bourne, Deputy Head of Learning at Shakespeare’s Globe, shares four places to get started with the free online resources developed by the theatre’s education team.

As well as being an iconic cultural venue, Shakespeare’s Globe provides free resources for schools, supporting teachers to create learning opportunities that provide challenge for all. With materials available for teachers and learners across all phases, our education resources are designed to:

·         Offer flexibility within the teaching of Shakespeare through active approaches, rehearsal room techniques or technology – giving opportunities for children to flourish across a range of domains;

·         Add breadth to learners’ understanding of vocabulary through interrogating language choices;

·         Add depth to leaners’ understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare’s texts and their contexts;

·         Use them as a springboard to wider learning opportunities, such as homework projects or longer-term investigations.

Each year we also run a “Playing Shakespeare” microsite which tracks a production as it is developed and performed. This year’s microsite is dedicated to Macbeth (details below).

Ready to go deeper with Shakespeare? Here are four places to get started…

1.      ‘Discover' zone

Great for an introduction to Shakespeare or a focus on context, the Globe website’s ‘Discover’ zone provides a wealth of information on: the history of Shakespeare’s Globe(s); factsheets about Shakespeare's world; blog posts from the Globe; music at the Globe; ‘ask an actor’ podcasts.

Our fact sheets – on Shakespeare, London, writing plays, actors, indoor theatre, special effects, the first Globe, playhouses, audiences, and costumes and cosmetics – are particularly useful for introducing students to Elizabethan and Jacobean contexts in an accessible way at KS2, and can easily be adapted to your lesson objectives. For example:

·         Support the development of critical literacy skills: “We have very few accounts of how the audience behaved, and most of them are about ‘bad’ behaviour. This probably tells us more about what was considered ‘news’ than about how audiences behaved all the time.”

·         Introduce learners to how performance conditions impact on texts: “There were practical reasons why some plays were better suited to indoor theatres. Indoor theatres had a small stage (about half the size of an outdoor theatre’s stage). There were also stools allowed on the stage: the most expensive seats, where rich ‘gallants’ sat to be seen as well as to watch. This gave the actors far less space for big battles or crowd scenes. On the other hand, the smaller space and the candlelight enhanced a play’s magical effects.” This could be followed by an investigation into which of Shakespeare’s plays learners think would suit each type of theatre.

2.      Staging It

An interactive filmmaker for desktops and tablets, Staging It aims to help learners understand Shakespeare’s texts from a director’s perspective and offers the option to virtually stage a scene at the Globe.

Actors are filmed performing a moment of a play on the Globe stage. Each line of their speech is shot four times, each time performed in different ways (happy, flirtatious, defensive, etc.). Students decide which clips to add to the dynamic storyboard to build a final scene. They can then interrogate the choices they made, and the impact of these on how each character is perceived.

These resources support students in recognising that the text is a conscious construct, shaped by the context in which it is received – vital preparation for GCSE English that can be introduced at KS3 through this resource.

Follow-up questions can be used to support the development of critical thinking: How am I looking at this character? What leads me to have this viewpoint? What does my viewpoint ignore? Is there another way to look at them? How might [a different culture/gender etc.] view them? Which of these possible viewpoints makes the most sense given the text? This could be modelled in advance by the teacher, as “revealing the thought processes of an expert learner helps to develop [these types of] metacognitive skills” (EEF, 2018).

3.      Teach Shakespeare

The Globe’s website for teachers, Teach Shakespeare provides hundreds of learning resources in multiple formats: photos, video clips from previous productions, synopses, audio interviews, fact sheets and schemes of work. Designed with input from teachers, the site can be searched by age range, play, format, or purpose (e.g. lesson plan/exam revision). No signup is needed to access the resources.

Many of these resources incorporate rehearsal room techniques. These have experimentation, collaboration and reflection at their heart, and encourage students to make their own discoveries about the text.

For example, this resource suggests the activity ‘walking the line’ to investigate Shakespeare’s use of metre: foot up on unstressed syllables and down on stressed syllables, noticing and commenting on irregularities in the ‘Gallop apace’ speech in Act 3 Scene 2 of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The ‘commenting’ is particularly important, because it is the collaborate nature of reflection that helps further the metacognitive talk referenced above. We provide video clips showing the actors undertaking some of these techniques, to model the insights that come through actively exploring the text in this way.

4. Playing Shakespeare

This site provides a gateway to all our previous production-specific websites created as part of the Playing Shakespeare project, each of which tracks a production from rehearsal to final performance. This year’s microsite is dedicated to Macbeth, with previous productions covered including Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew. Each of these sites contains photos, interviews with the cast and director, design briefs, articles and teaching activities.

The interviews with cast members give students the opportunity to unpick the texts in performance – a key aspect in appreciating the form. Listen to several Macbeths discussing their interpretations, for example, can help students understand that, unlike a novel, a drama text is incomplete on the page.

There are research articles on particular plays, written for a KS3-4 audience moving to focus in more detail on the relationship between text and context. These provide a rich exploration of writer's craft that cannot be separated from context, and can be used to model the integrated approach to this required for higher-level literary analysis.

Our Macbeth 2020 website has launched and will begin tracking the production in January!

1. Language: director's edit

Our “script machines” display the script of five key scenes from the play, but with a twist: you have the option of showing the director's edit. This enables you to unpick AO2 more organically with learners, because the interplay between language (Shakespeare's text) and form (a script to be edited for the stage) becomes apparent. For example:

Juliet: O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies.

• What do the cut lines convey in terms of meaning?
• What does removing them achieve?
  
• What meaning is the director drawing our attention towards, or away from, through this edit?
  

This serves as a reminder that, in any performance text, there is more than one conscious construct at work. Although learners will need to know the whole text, the “meanings and effects” (AO2) has a greater plurality when considered in this light.

Indeed, this can also lead to discussions around the context: the origins of Shakespeare's writing, shaped by the theatre practices of his day, mean that even modern editions of the same, full play-text may differ. What an audience receives, therefore, is already layered with interpretation.

2. Language: literary terms

This part of the resource gives learners the opportunity to identify where certain literary techniques are being used by Shakespeare, across five key scenes. This can be used as a revision tool, but why not use it to model the thought processes in understanding how these techniques work to create meanings and effects? This moves learners away from the fallacy of technique-spotting, and can be adapted for KS3 and KS4.

With this in mind, several techniques in each scene are broken down into a series of questions, on our Teachers’ Notes page. For example:

• Tybalt describes the servants as “heartless hinds”. How does this metaphor show that Tybalt has a low opinion of the servants? Use the questions below to support your thinking.
  
• What possible meanings does the word “hind” have?
  
• How about the word “heartless”? Hint: remember that Shakespeare’s audience would have heard the play; “heartless” could also therefore be heard as “hart-less”. How could this link to “hind”?
  
• Consider the effect of the alliteration in making this link.
  
• How does this contribute to the servants’ definition of masculinity set up in the opening exchange between Sampson and Gregory?
  

To extend the challenge, learners could then create their own questions to deconstruct other techniques. Creating these questions demands higher-order thinking, as learners need to be at Bloom's level of “analysis” before attempting this. To scaffold them up to this level of challenge, they could look at how the same technique is deconstructed in a different scene. This has the added benefit of highlighting the nuanced effects of the same technique used in different parts of the text.

3. Research articles: Brooke versus Shakespeare

Brooke's 1562 poem, “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet”, served as a key source for Shakespeare. So far, so bolt-on AO3. However, this resource allows learners to compare the differences between Shakespeare's prologue and Brooke's “argument”. It highlights how Shakespeare’s drama occurs over just five days, whereas Brooke’s poem unfolds over nine months, and that Juliet’s age is lowered from 16 to 13.

Drawing out these differences allows for rich exploration of writer's craft that cannot be separated from context, required for the top bands at GCSE.

• Have learners compare the time reference in Brooke's “argument” with Shakespeare's prologue, and discuss what effect this might have.
  
• Next, ask learners to find all the references to time within Shakespeare's version; what patterns do they spot? Why is it that time seems to pass so quickly in the play? Consider this also in light of Shakespeare's younger Juliet.
  
• What meaning is being created through these marked changes to the original source material? If time is compacted and Juliet is younger, what might this suggest about the speed of young love?
  
• How does the adaptation of form – from poem to play – affect how it is received?
  

4. Character interviews

Providing learners with the opportunity to engage with text in performance is a cornerstone of the work we do, and part of this involves providing access to actors taking part in the production.

Although learners wouldn't need to analyse actors' interpretations in their exam, the character interviews provide a window into hearing how someone else arrived at an informed, personal response (AO1). Questions cover: What are your initial impressions of your character(s)? What have you noticed about your character’s language, i.e. the way they speak to others/about themselves?

Characters are interviewed several times across the production, providing learners with opportunities to reflect on the complex nature of interpretation: how this can be revised with each more detailed exploration of the text.

To access these resources, plus a wealth of additional resources to support a challenging curriculum, visit 2019.playingshakespeare.org. Remember: the website tracks the production so please keep coming back to see what else we have added!

Charlotte Bourne is Deputy Head of Learning at Shakespeare’s Globe, with a focus on learners aged 3-18, plus the educators who support them. The Globe’s on-site Lively Action programme welcomes close to 80,000 learners per year, while its international outreach work sends practitioners to China, the US and Europe. A qualified English teacher and AQA examiner for GCSE Literature, Charlotte has worked closely with ITTs and NQTs across multiple subjects.

In this excerpt from the NACE Essentials guide “Realising the potential of more able learners in GCSE science”, NACE Associate Ed Walsh outlines six key steps to improve provision and outcomes for those capable of attaining the highest grades in this subject. 

1. Make effective use of assessment data

While many schools devote a significant amount of time to assembling, applying, marking and grading periodic tests, there’s often scope for these to be used more effectively to diagnose areas for improvement. Question-level analysis can help both teachers and learners identify areas of low subject knowledge and skills gaps (tagged against GCSE assessment objectives) – informing feedback, self-assessment and goal-setting, interventions, evaluation of teaching styles and planning for future lessons.

Similarly, analysis can indicate how learners perform in multiple choice questions, shorter written responses and longer responses. Be prepared: if aspirational students are looking to develop in one of these areas, they’ll expect guidance as to how to do so. Woe betide the teacher who can’t provide a learner chasing a good grade either with more examples or effective strategies in areas identified as weaknesses!

2. Challenge learners to use a range of command words

Each awarding organisation uses a particular set of command words in GCSE science exams. Some of these will already be in common parlance in your science lessons, while others may not be used as often. Familiarising learners with the full range of these terms will prepare them to answer a wider range of questions. 

When revising a topic, prompt learners to suggest the type of questions examiners might ask; this will help them revise more effectively. Elicit the nature of each question, encouraging learners to consider the influence of assessment objectives (AOs) and to use a full range of command words.

3. Develop dialogue with the maths department

The quality of dialogue with colleagues in maths and the development of a whole-school numeracy policy has never been so important. (It may also never have been so tricky, bearing in mind the pressure that both maths and science teams can be under.) It can be tempting for a hard-pressed science department to want the maths team to fit in with their running order of topics. The maths curriculum is also driven by a sense of progression, but not necessarily the same one. Skills demanded in KS3 science may in some cases not be taught in maths until KS4.

Rather than reach an impasse, focus on exploring common ground. Set up a joint meeting and look at maths skills involved in sample science questions. Invite colleagues to explore potential strategies, terminology, likely challenges for learners and how they would deal with these. As well as nurturing specific skills, focus on developing learners’ ability to identify effective strategies and sequencing. More able learners aiming for high grades need to develop problem-solving skills as well as a mastery of individual skills.

4. Review the role of practical work and skills

When carrying out required practicals, ensure learners have access to a range of question types, including questions based on AO2 (application of knowledge and understanding) and AO3 (interpretation and evaluation). It is also important to look at the lists of apparatus and techniques skills in the GCSE specification. Questions relating to practical work are often based on these, even if the context isn’t one learners have met in the required practicals. Assess how good learners are at these skills and whether you can give them more opportunities to develop these. These have a strong relationship with skills used at A-level, meaning those progressing to further study will also benefit.

5. Develop the role of extended writing

Candidates will be expected to develop extended responses, especially on higher tier papers. Look at learners’ performance on such questions to see how it compares with other items. It may be useful to encourage learners to consider what structure to use before commencing writing. Model the drafting of an extended response, demonstrating how you select key words, use connectives, structure a response and check against the answer. AQA, for example, is moving towards the use of generic descriptors for types of extended responses.

6. Link ideas from different parts of the specification

As part of the changes to GCSE science specifications, learners are expected to show that they can work and think flexibly, linking ideas from different areas. Use questions that require this, identifying good examples to use in advance. One of the sample questions uses the context of a current balance, including ideas about magnetic fields and levers. Check out the specification and the guidance it gives about key ideas and linkage. As well as scrutinising the detailed content, look at the preamble and follow-up.

1. Would it be better if we all spoke the same language?

2. Should celebrities influence you more than your parents?

3. Should you believe the history books?

4. Do humans need religion?