If we were to design an assessment system focused on maximising learning, we wouldn’t create a Key Stage 3 “No Man’s Land” followed by the high-stakes pressure of GCSE jeopardy. Yet, this is precisely the experience many students face in today’s education system — a period of inconsistent focus in the early years of secondary school, followed by a sudden and overwhelming rush to perform well in exams that could significantly shape their future.

The Key Stage 3 No Man’s Land

Many of us remember our own drift through the No Man’s Land of Key Stage 3, which can feel like a purposeless academic environment. My own Key Stage 3 drift, accompanied by terrible school reports suggesting I was not a pleasure to teach, was not caused by the disruption of secondary transition or by the distorting accountability system. I know this because I attended a de-facto middle (i.e. split-site secondary) school in an era just before league tables took hold.

I believe my Key Stage 3 drift occurred because learning felt unfocused to me. According to most well-validated theories of motivation, humans like to work towards goals. Outside the core curriculum, I was highly motivated to work towards drama shows and music exams. But at school, the curriculum didn’t seem to have any sense of a journey, an end-point, or a purpose. I understand that might be difficult to read if you teach Key Stage 3, after all, I’m sure your curriculum map does have a purpose, but it’s just how it felt to me as a student.

I don’t remember the relaxed drift of Key Stage 3 as being fun. Carrying a deep sense of apathy about a significant portion of your life makes time drag. Can we give Key Stage 3 a greater sense of progression? To answer that, we must turn to the game of GCSE jeopardy that follows it.

GCSE Jeopardy

My Key Stage 4 experience was very different from what students experience today. I loved starting real courses with a purpose. Nobody put any pressure on me to achieve particular grades. And thanks to the coursework-heavy era, I took very few exams at the end of Year 11.

Today, we ask adolescents to play a game of GCSE jeopardy, mastering a significant amount of material crushed into a very short space of time, all while knowing that their performance in these exams could determine their future opportunities. This high-pressure environment can be both motivating and overwhelming, often leading to anxiety, burnout, and, in some cases, disengagement just when students need to be most focused.

You don’t need to be an expert in motivational theory to realise that loading all the stakes of five years of education into a few weeks in May at age 16 doesn’t optimise for encouraging consistent effort throughout secondary school.

How We Got Here: Coursework and Modular Exams

Nobody designed GCSE qualifications from scratch. They evolved gradually out of a secondary education system that served very different societies. But most of us can remember what went wrong with coursework and modular exams, which in part is why we ended up here.

For a while, we staggered some examinations under a modular system. Those of us who taught (or even studied) in that era will remember the disruption to teaching caused by endless retakes. Why did this happen? The jeopardy wasn’t high enough! Students knew that if they didn’t put the effort into revising, there would be another chance next term. This is the tricky thing about stakes—we need them to be high enough so that students know they must do their best, but not so high that the stress is overwhelming and the consequences of poor performance are inefficient and unjust.

I think teachers and students look back more positively on the coursework era, especially in the time before accountability pressures when schools had few incentives to distort the assessment and learning process. But that ship has long since sailed. And it was always the case that middle-class families could better support the completion of coursework than others. (I remember my older sister—who is very creative—staying up all night to watch local election results and help me finalise and mount my GCSE art portfolio.) Since coursework was generally a one-shot submission without retakes, it didn’t suffer from the retake problems of modularisation. But now we are in an era of Large Language Models, it is hard to see how it can survive and even grow as a material part of Key Stage 4 certification in many subjects.

Smoothing Student Stress

Knowing that it’ll never happen, let’s try to imagine how we would create a set of goals for students to work towards throughout the five years of secondary school, without worrying about the accountability system. What might we consider doing?

First, since we have no accountability system, we can consider creating goal structures that suit the knowledge architecture of each individual subject. We can define ‘goal’ broadly, as working towards an exam, an assessed piece of classwork, a portfolio, a performance, an exhibition, an object, or just a course ending.

For hierarchical subjects where mastery is critical, students could move through a series of grades, only progressing to the next grade when each one is mastered. Mark McCourt has written brilliantly about how this could work for maths—there would not be a GCSE end-point exam, but rather something like 25 grades that students can work through. Similar approaches could work in other hierarchical domains such as languages. Of course, retakes would be allowed, but the incentive to work hard and avoid them would be high since peers who had successfully passed the grade would move on without you. At the end of compulsory schooling, students would be differentiated by the grade achieved, signalling the content they had successfully mastered, rather than by the mark achieved in a test of universal curriculum content. This approach creates a set of difficulties that schools are ill-equipped to deal with since students would not necessarily progress at the speed of the class to which they were assigned. (Coping with this is another blog post entirely!)

Other more discursive subjects might choose to structure their courses around certification where everyone in the class has to move through a set of assessments together, with a ‘pass’ so low that nearly everyone can pass, and differentiation taking place through a traditional mark or grade. However, our system of optimising motivation to study would have the timings of these assessments distributed through the five years, with nothing to prevent us from having individual subjects that start and end at non-standard times (e.g. a Shakespeare performance drama qualification that starts in September of Year 9 and ends three months later, assessed solely as pass/fail based on participation in the show). We can also adopt a more flexible approach to thinking about where we want the curriculum to end and extra-curricular activities to begin, and about how compulsory and optional parts of the curriculum can be intertwined.

Some subjects suit distributed assessment, with evidence collected through a course. Some subjects suit synoptic assessments that require students to synthesise across an extended period of learning. Some subjects suit extensive assessments across a variety of modes (e.g. oral exams, multiple choice, performances, etc.), whilst others suit a narrower approach. The variation in demands of subjects for different types of assessment is a useful feature and not a drawback if our goal is to distribute the goals-based motivational approaches as smoothly as possible over five years.

We can use the principles of goals-based motivation and jeopardy to make other decisions that are likely to affect student behaviour. For example, when should an assessment be ‘wiped from the transcript’¹? The answer is that we should do so when the motivational benefits of wiping clean the slate of failure ex-post outweigh the demotivational ex-ante costs of knowing the slate can be wiped clean!

Making It Happen

I doubt I will witness significant GCSE reform in my lifetime, and I feel saddened that my own children will be put through the status quo. Changing GCSEs is complex, involving a radical rethink of the curriculum, the structure of the school day, the accountability system, and so on. But it’s worth imagining a future that fosters more joyful and productive learning in secondary schools, even if we can never make it there.

1. to use an American phrase—I recommend you read Off The Mark by Schneider and Hutt if you are interested in the US assessment system ↩︎