9-1 Numbers replace letters. The new Mathematics GCSE on results day.

GCSE results day has made known that pupils only need 17% in their Mathematics GCSE to gain a 4 – a pass equivalent of a C. What lies behind the GCSE reforms brought in by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb?

GCSE results day is an excellent time to look at our schools and to consider the end of year report on their progress. 2017 is a turbulent time for English schools. The Times Educational Supplement, a weekly education paper, reported at the end of the July that young graduates were ‘deserting’ teaching. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) stated that 30% of newly qualified teachers leave the profession after five years. TeachFirst, a scheme to attract the very best graduates into schools at the very start of their working lives loose 57% of their teachers three years of starting their training. To what has been described as a ‘perfect storm’ in England’s classrooms going into the school year 2017 – 18, we have to add the government’s failure to achieve its own targets for Teacher Training for five years in a row, a growing school population, complaints from classroom teachers about their workload and the effect of Brexit on thousands of EU nationals who currently work in our schools.

GCSEs have also changed. On August 26th, this years cohort of Year 11 pupils will get results in English and Mathematics graded on the new 9-1 grades. The courses they have followed and the exams they have sat in these core subjects have got harder. Some teachers have complained that the new courses are one and a half GCSEs, others bemoan the lack of exemplar materials available to this year’s group of young people facing an important hurdle on their journey into the adult world.

Why have the GCSEs changed?

One reason for the change was that universities and employers sought more nuanced differentiation between pupils, particularly high achieving pupils. Others want to bring our standards up to those being achieved by pupils in East Asia. We know we are not the world’s best at Mathematics because the OECD PISA report. Launched in 2000, around 540,000 students from 72 countries took part in PISA 2015. The results for Mathematics put the UK 27th overall with a Mean Score of 492. Singapore came top with a Mean Maths score of 564. According to the data 22 percent of UK 15 year olds do not reach Level 2 – the baseline achievement – which means they cannot solve problems routinely faced by adults in their daily lives. 11 per cent of UK pupils are top performers compared to Singapore with 35 per cent deemed to be in this category. Within the UK, students in England and Northern Ireland scored 493 points in maths, students in Scotland scored 491. Welsh students scored only 478, below the Organisation for European Cooperation and Development (OECD) average. This pattern was repeated in reading and science.

Do PISA results matter?

Given that Mathematics is the language of Science and Engineering, it can be argued that this is fundamental to our future as a global manufacturing power. PISA trends are important because 15 year olds grow to become our future industrialists, entrepreneurs and political leaders. In a globalised economy we need the very best Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics results to give us a bedrock on which to grow new industries and companies to ensure our economic future and that of our children and grandchildren. Britain no longer has the resources of an empire to fall back on and soon will be without the resources of the EU, our nearest trading partners.

So how could we improve on this situation?

Firstly the teacher recruitment crisis. With school leaders failing to recruit in eight out of ten occasions, Headteachers and school Governing bodies need to take a more proactive role in finding potential staff in their local communities. Schools need to look to their local Universities to offer new opportunities to both schools and Universities alike. This could include paid work experience for undergraduates to work in schools alongside teachers, coaching pupils for exams and mentoring them at a vital stage in their young lives. Contact with good role models can be life changing. Such schemes may also plant the idea of teaching in the minds of young graduates who may be unaware of the challenge that a modern community school can present.

Secondly, we also need to consider the structure of a teaching career. Is it right and proper that we ask teaching staff to serve forty years doing the same or similar thing year after year, coping with the stress of managing challenging groups of children? We may retain more good staff by offering a year’s sabbatical for every ten years service as happens, for example, in Australia, This would allow experienced members of staff an opportunity to recharge their batteries, pursue further study, upgrade their skills or just an opportunity to spend more time with their families. Another reform would also offer more opportunities for teachers to spend time in industry, gaining work experience to take modern ideas about what industries need back into classrooms.This could be one possible use of a sabbatical year. The gulf between schools and industry is growing and is one that employers constantly complain. Such a reform may help reduce this divide and may even attract new money from industry if it proved to be a success. A bigger pool of relevantly qualified and motivated youngsters who were looking to develop their skills and their careers in industry may open up new finding for such a scheme.

Thirdly, we need to pay more attention to the methods used in East Asia that are obviously serving them so well. Perhaps we should seek guidance from Singapore in teacher training and how they manage to keep their teachers sharp and in the classroom Do they have such high wastage rates after three or five years? If not, why not? We need answers if we are to improve our position in the PISA rankings.

These are expensive proposals. No apology there. But consider the alternatives. If we keep our current system our economy may still languish alongside Italy, as what the Independent reported as the ‘worst performing advanced economy in the world’. It means that Britain is bottom of the G7 group of advanced economies with a growth rate of 0.2% in the first three months of 2017. Canada has surged to the top with a growth rate of 0.9%. Before the Brexit vote June 2016, Britain was flying high, outgrowing the US, Germany and Japan. Unless we make changes, this may not be the case in future years