Education secretary Gavin Williamson must “act now” on preparing how GCSEs will be assessed in 2022, the president of the NEU teaching union has said, the TES reports.
Robin Bevan said teachers cannot teach the whole GCSE syllabus due to Covid disruption and are being forced to guess what will come up next May and June.
Mr Bevan said teachers should receive advance notice of any plans for concessions to be made on GCSE papers. He also called for exam content to be cut by a quarter.
His comments come as many independent schools have underlined the consistency of learning they have maintained throughout the pandemic. The pressure group Rethinking Assessment has just launched a consultation to garner views from those in education on devising a replacement for GCSEs entirely.
Mr Bevan told TES: “If you’re not already, as secretary of state, thinking about the [GCSEs in] summer of 2022, you’re in trouble because that’s where you should be – and you probably ought to be a year or two after [that].
He added: “If you know now as a headteacher or a subject teacher what it is you’re working towards for the summer of 2022, then you can begin to put in place plans that ensure that what you’re teaching is focused on what you need to do rather than what I’ve called curriculum bingo.
“This is a kind of game where, at the moment, teachers are having to guess what to teach because they don’t know what’s going to come up in examinations, but they just know that they’re not going to be able to do everything.”