Reforming Key Stage 4 Qualifications

Reforming Key Stage 4 Qualifications

Consultation Response Form

The closing date is: 10 December 2012Your comments must reach us by that date.

/

Information provided in response to this consultation, including personal information, may be subject to publication or disclosure in accordance with the access to information regimes, primarily the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 1998.

If you want all, or any part, of your response to be treated as confidential, please explain why you consider it to be confidential.

If a request for disclosure of the information you have provided is received, your explanation about why you consider it to be confidential will be taken into account, but no assurance can be given that confidentiality can be maintained. An automatic confidentiality disclaimer generated by your IT system will not, of itself, be regarded as binding on the Department.

The Department will process your personal data (name and address and any other identifying material) in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and in the majority of circumstances, this will mean that your personal data will not be disclosed to third parties.

Please tick if you want us to keep your response confidential. /
Reason for confidentiality:
Name / Dr Steve Tilling
Organisation (if applicable) / Field Studies Council
Address: / Head Office
Preston Montford
Montford Bridge
Shrewsbury
Shropshire
England
SY4 1HW

If your enquiry is related to the policy content of the consultation you can contact The Department on:

Telephone: 0370 000 2288

e-mail:

If your enquiry is related to the DfE e-consultation website or the consultation process in general, you can contact the Consultation Unit by e-mail: or by telephone: 0370 000 2288 or via the Department's 'Contact Us' page.

Please mark the box that best describes you as a respondent.

/ School / / College / / Academy
/ Higher Education Institute / / Further Education Institute / / Local Authority
/ Subject Association / / Parent / / Student
/ Union / / Employer-Business Sector / / Governor
/ HT/Teacher / / Awarding Organisations / X / Other
/ Established in 1943, the Field Studies Council (FSC) is a pioneering educational charity committed to bringing environmental understanding to all. The FSC provides informative and enjoyable opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to discover, explore, be inspired by, and understand the natural and built environment.
We feel that fieldwork should be a vital element of an imaginative and contemporary science, history and geography education. We welcome every year over 3,000 school groups and 145,000 visitors to our national network of 17 Field Centres. We also work with 40+ universities every year. The FSC has become internationally respected for its national network of education centres and is the UK’s leading provider of curriculum focused field courses for secondary schools. For example, over the past 8 years we have worked with over 75% of London’s secondary schools, and also 250 of the most disadvantaged secondary schools throughout England.
The FSC also runs a programme of courses for PGCE training teachers and newly qualified teachers (NQTs), providing effective and meaningful training to deliver learning outside the classroom. Some courses are delivered in partnership with awarding bodies, and others with national bodies such as the national Science Learning Centre at York.
We also work at national level with leading subject associations, including the Association for Science Education, Geographical Association and Royal Geographical Society, and have published national reports jointly with these and other groups highlighting curriculum-related issues such as curriculum design and content, assessment, inspections, training and CPD.
FSC is also a major education publisher, distributing 140,000 publications annually, including many to schools.
Our evidence is presented in the light of this considerable experience.

Title

1 Do you agree that the new qualifications should not be called "GCSEs"?

/ Agree / / Disagree / / Not sure
/ Comments:
No comment

2a) Do you agree that the new qualifications should be called English Baccalaureate Certificates?

/ Agree / / Disagree / / Not sure
/ Comments:
No comment.

2b) If not, what alternative title should be adopted?

/ Comments:
No comment.

High expectation of performance and accurate grading

3 Do you agree with our expectations for grading structures, set out in paragraphs 5.4 to 5.5?

X / Agree / / Disagree / / Not sure
/ Comments:
We welcome the aims set out within 5.4, in particular ensuring that students have a sound understanding of the subject (which must include having the practical skills necessary).
We would also appreciate greater clarification regarding the “more detail” that Awarding Organisations would provide about students’ achievements, beyond the grading.

4 Do you believe that we should insist on a common grading structure for allEnglish Baccalaureate Certificates or should we allow Awarding Organisations the freedom to innovate?

X / Common Grading Structure / / Freedom to innovate / / Other
/ Comments:
We would recommend that a common grading structure is implemented and that this structure is retained (even if/when the Awarding Organisation changes for a subject). This would ensure that all interested parties (including employers) are able to understand the grades awarded and how they are comparable across the board and between consecutive years.

No tiering

5 Do you agree that it will be possible to end tiering for the full range of subjects that we will be creating new qualifications for?

X / Yes / / No / / Not Sure
/ Comments:

6 Are there particular approaches to examinations which might be needed to make this possible for some subjects?

X / Yes / / No / / Not Sure
/ Comments:
The FSC believes that there should be a universal entitlement to the full range of teaching and learning approaches, including practical work and fieldwork in subjects such as science, history and geography. These experiential and contextual approaches to learning are known to motivate and improve attitudes to education in some students who do not excel in classroom. Any grading cap which was also accompanied by a two tier approach to teaching (ie. with fieldwork for higher tier students; without fieldwork for lower-tier students) would, therefore, make it much less likely that students would be able to achieve to their full potential.
It is critical, therefore, that the design of examinations and assessment also enable students of all abilities to demonstrate their full potential, including through fieldwork and practicals.

Assessed 100% by examination, or minimising reliance on internal assessment

7a) We intend that English Baccalaureate Certificates should be assessed 100% by externally marked examinations. Do you agree?

/ All / / English / / mathematics
/ sciences / / history / / geography
/ languages / X / None
/ Comments:
We would expect that the practical skills (including procedural, enquiry-led and investigative skills delivered through fieldwork) that are vital to the sound understanding of these subjects be an integrated element of the assessment process to gain the English Baccalaureate qualification. We are as yet unconvinced that this need is currently recognised within the vision for the terminal examinations.
See 7b below.

7b) If not, which aspects of English, mathematics, the sciences, history, geography or language do you believe absolutely require internal assessment to fully demonstrate the skills required, and why?

/ Comments:
December 2010. Sarah Teather (Westminster Hall, Outdoor Learning Debate)
“Outdoor learning is a vital part of understanding history and field trips in science and geography are all important”
November 2011. Gov. response to Science & Technology select committee.
The government agrees that practical lessons, fieldwork and field trips are essential contributors to good quality science education.
The FSC believes that the key purpose of assessment is to validate the skills, knowledge and understanding that a student has acquired in their course, programme or curriculum. Any external assessment that fails to do this is flawed.
Currently, fieldwork and practical skills in proposed E Bacc subjects such as science and geography are mainly examined through internally assessed examinations including controlled assessment and coursework. Whilst the FSC accepts that the present internal assessment approaches have serious weaknesses it believes that their presence still provides the strongest inducement for senior managers and teachers to adopt fieldwork and practicals as part of a balanced and high quality course. Withdrawing this support without introducing an equivalent inducement will weaken the provision of fieldwork, and consequently the quality of science and geography education in England. As a result, education in England is likely to drop even further down international comparators such as PISA. Therefore, in the absence of any evidence that external assessments will provide an adequate or improved replacement for assessing practical and procedural skills and higher-level enquiry and investigative learning, the FSC does not support the implementation of 100% assessment through external exams.
The FSC strongly recommends that 100% externally marked examinations in practical subjects such as science and geography should only be implemented if a) they improve on what we already have, and or b) the external examinations are able to discriminate in favour of students who have taken part in fieldwork, and/or c) the accompanying curriculum guidance guarantees the provision of high-quality fieldwork and practicals in these subjects, preferably through a statutory (mandatory) requirement.

Size requirement for syllabus

8 Should our expectation be that English Baccalaureate Certificates take the same amount of curriculum time as the current GCSEs? Or should schools be expected to place greater curriculum emphasis on teaching the core subjects?

/ Same amount of curriculum time / / Greater curriculum emphasis / X / Other
/ Comments:
Curriculum time in E Bacc subjects such as science and geography should provide sufficient space for a full range of high quality teaching and learning approaches, including practicals and fieldwork activity. Anecdotal evidence in schools introducing triple (separate) GCSE sciences into a pre-existing double-award (combined) science timetable suggests that out-of-classroom and extracurricular activities can be squeezed out by the need to teach additional subject content, predominantly through classroom teaching.
Present levels of fieldwork should be benchmarked. The FSC recommends that the time available to teach E Bacc subjects through practicals and fieldwork must be maintained at least at present levels.
The FSC also recommends that increased time could be made available for fieldwork and field trips if senior managers and teachers adopted innovative approaches which maximised cross-curricular team teaching (collapsing timetables to teach suites of E Bacc subjects for example). Making better use of cross-subject synergies (science and literacy, geography and numeracy for example) has been recommended in recent Ofsted subject reports.

Examination aids

9 Which examinations aids do you consider necessary to allow students to fully demonstrate the knowledge and skills required?

/ Comments:
Aids to support science and geography (at least) examinations should include:
Access to laboratory and fieldwork apparatus and materials which would enable students to demonstrate that they could select which are effective for an investigation, and use them appropriately.
Primary data, including self-recorded observations and measurements, which enables them to test hypotheses, including identifying variables to control and measure, evaluate and suggest improvements.

Subject suites

10 Do you agree that these are appropriate subject suites? If not, what would you change?

X / Yes
/ Comments:

11 Is there also a need for a combined science option covering elements of all three sciences?

X / Yes
/ Comments:
The FSC strongly supports the inclusion of a combined science option. This provides the best guarantee that students will receive a balanced coverage of whole science, and be provided with the knowledge, skills and understanding which underpins multi-disciplinary approaches to much of contemporary scientific research and STEM applications (in areas such as climate change, ecosystem services, large infrastructure projects etc.).

Track Record

12 What qualities should we look for in English Baccalaureate Certificatesthat will provide evidence that they will support students to be able to compete internationally?

/ Comments:
There should be evidence to show that students have been required to apply their knowledge and understanding through practical work. Formal evidence (through examinations, assessments and/or personal portfolios) should include recognition that E Bacc students have been taught the following in science and geography in the field and laboratory:
·  Experimental skills and investigations: Developing hypotheses; planning investigations; using a range of techniques, apparatus and materials; making and recording a range of observations and measurements
·  Handling information and problem solving: Analysing, evaluating critically and presenting observations and data; interpreting; making inferences and drawing conclusions; suggesting improvements; presenting and communicating.

Assurance of literacy and numeracy

13 Do you agree that we should place a particular emphasis on the successful English language and mathematics qualifications providing the best assurance of literacy and numeracy?

/ Agree / / Disagree / / Not sure
/ Comments:
No comment.

School and Post-16 institution Support

14In order to allow effective teaching and administration of examinations, what support do you think Awarding Organisations should be:

a)Required to offer?

/ Comments:
Substantial recent evidence shows that there are insufficient science teachers with the competence, confidence and commitment to teach GCSE science outside the classroom. Awarding Organisations should facilitate support and training which enables teachers to adopt the full range of teaching and learning approaches, including fieldwork. AOs could:
·  Signpost events and opportunities led by independent providers;
·  Work with independent resource providers, subject associations and umbrella bodies to ensure teachers and students have access to high-quality resources (printed, online etc.)

14b) Prevented from offering?

/ Comments:
See 14a above. In order to nurture more innovative and diverse support which is able to cater for the full range of teachers and students needs, there could/should be a presumption against direct delivery of training and resource development support by the AOs themselves, and any direct involvement by current examiners and moderators.

15 How can Awarding Organisations eliminate any unnecessary burdens on schools and post-16 institutions relating to the administration of English Baccalaureate Certificates?