Nearly a quarter of teachers in the independent sector want GCSEs to be scrapped once the Covid crisis is over, a TES survey suggests.
Twenty-four per cent of more than 480 independent school teachers surveyed agreed they should be ditched, compared to 22 per cent of teachers over all.
However a majority, 59 per cent of the 2,800 respondents, all of whom were grading GCSEs and A-levels this year, said they disagreed the exams should be abandoned.
The survey comes following calls — often from within the independent sector — for the exams to be reformed or scrapped altogether.
But the various responses from teachers to the TES survey suggest there is more support for GCSEs than newspaper articles might suggest.
Some teacher comments suggested that, while they wanted to keep GCSEs, they would like a more modular form of assessment to return.
Sarah Fletcher, high mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School in London and a member of Rethinking Assessment, a campaign group calling for radical reform of the system, said: “If you suggest ‘scrapping‘ then the question immediately arises, but what next? My opinion is we do need some form of assessment at 16-plus but it should be slimmed down and very much reformed.”