GCSEs should be branded separately in England, Wales and NI, expert says

GCSEs should be branded to show if they were awarded in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, reflecting the increasing differences between each country’s version of the exam, according to a professor of education.

With about 800,000 16-year-olds waiting to receive their GCSE results on Thursday, Prof Alan Smithers of Buckingham University also said there could be wide variations in results between the national administrations this year.

Smithers said his best guess was that while overall grades may fall compared with last year, top grades in England may be similar to 2023 and those in Wales and Northern Ireland will be lower, repeating the pattern in last week’s A-level results.

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Exam boards and administrators across the three countries consult to keep GCSEs broadly similar, but differences in course content, assessment and grading have pulled them in different directions.

GCSEs in England have had the use of coursework assessments eliminated or downgraded in recent years, and the country’s numerical scale uses 9 as the top grade down to 1 as the lowest. Exams administered in Wales and Northern Ireland use letter grades from A* to G, with Northern Ireland adding an additional C* grade.

Education funding and policymaking are almost entirely devolved to national administrations. Scotland has its own qualifications system , and most students there received their results earlier this month.

Smithers said that although the national grades were approximately the same, it was difficult for employers and educators to compare them accurately. His solution is for GCSEs to be renamed or rebranded with national identifiers added to avoid confusion.

“If employers or sixth-form colleges are looking at GCSEs, they currently need to look very closely at the details to distinguish them from one another,” Smithers said. “Any change would be difficult but there should be individual branding, and at the very least it should give an indication of where the GCSEs were taken.”

In terms of this year’s results, Smithers is forecasting as many as 71,000 fewer top grades to be awarded across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in all age groups, including resits, as regulators attempt to align with pre-pandemic results.

Predictions that top grades in A-levels would fall proved misplaced last week, with the highest proportion of A* grades awarded in England since they were first introduced.

Ofqual said it had used the 2023 A-levels as the benchmark for setting this year’s grade boundaries. Its chief regulator, Ian Bauckham, said there had been no grade inflation and that the improvement was “largely due to the ability of the cohort” taking this year’s exams.

Smithers said: “I do think we will see fewer top [GCSE] grades in 2024 than 2023, but I am not sure how many because the Department for Education [in England] is currently giving the impression of wanting ‘feelgood’ results.”

Smithers also argues that England should drop its requirement for teenagers who fail GCSE English or maths to keep retaking them while in education.

“It must be soul-destroying to continually have to retake English or maths. Surely, there is an urgent need for a policy rethink,” he said.