What if the exam itself gatekeeps

Reading the entry figures in Whittaker et al. (the 42% of schools no longer entering any pupils for GCSE Music, the 43% fall in A-level entries since 2011) I find myself thinking less about the headline numbers and more about what happens inside the qualification for the pupils who do get entered, because that’s the vantage point I spent years sitting in as chief examiner and chair of examiners for GCSE Music. Entry data tells you who got through the school-level gate. It doesn’t tell you what the exam itself was quietly selecting for once they were through it.

That question has just been given a much sharper answer by Beauchamp, Breeze, John and MacGregor’s new piece in the same journal, Forty years of the General Certificate of Secondary Education, tracing the GCSE’s performing–composing–appraising structure from its introduction in 1986 through to 2026. Their documentary analysis of specifications across England, Wales and Northern Ireland identifies a slow but consistent drift: a qualification that was designed around accessible, practical music-making has, specification revision by specification revision, shifted weight towards abstract knowledge about music rather than the making of it. They characterise the three nations as pulling in different directions as they do; something closer to political stasis in Northern Ireland, a more progressive divergence in Wales, and in England a pull towards academic standardisation.

That academic drift is not an abstraction to anyone who has sat where I’ve sat, though I never saw this drift during my tenure as a Chief Examiner. Though I could not talk about my examining work in a blog post in detail, I very much worked diligently to preserve the integrity and validity of the assessment process. Selecting set works is a particularly tricky activity; finding music that will be enjoyable for students and teachers to work on for a long period of time is difficult! Not because of the lack of potential works, but for finding music that satisfies the assessment strategy, DFE content and the specification. We were also keen to ensure we selected work that would champion the ambitions we held to improve representation and diversity in the works studied.

The other challenge is seeing educators becoming increasingly confident with meeting assessment objectives and their confident understanding of marking schemes to reverse engineer the more creative components of the GCSE. Composing became something that was scaffolded through carefully planned teaching to secure successful marks; you may see increased consistency in approach as educators learn the best approaches to meet the criteria. This anecdotal perspective is of course problematic; as a composer I was always troubled by the straight-jacket of the marking criteria as well as being satisfied that the criteria had the potential to cater for a range of musics created. However the pressure for examination performance, any educator leading GCSE Music would want to understand such criteria to enable them to guide students (ethically and morally) in the right directions to achieve well.

I admired the IB Music approach; the course had to cater for students of such wide and varied beginnings, and be deliverable across the world. This necessitated a more innovative approach to course design and assessment, I felt, and it enabled students from a range of backgrounds to undertake work that championed their interests and enabled students from a range of experience levels and ambitions to enjoy the process. I hoped. Assessing some of the work gave me insight into the sheer breadth of submissions.

The other challenge I found as a teacher of GCSE Music was encouraging those that were already engaged in a large amount of music-making beyond school that opting for the course was a good choice for them. The specification sometimes did not feel of sufficient challenge to those who were undertaking studies extensively often at weekends or at a junior conservatoire. I made perhaps an error of judgement as a Director of Music when I attempted to create different pathways for more advanced musicians that stifled a more traditional route through KS4 Music; it is a difficult subject to cater for a broad range of abilities (what isn’t).

Whittaker et al. name ‘academic and assessment pressures restricting choice’ as one of their ecosystem model’s persistent barriers; Beauchamp et al. give that barrier a forty-year documentary spine. Put the two papers side by side and the picture sharpens considerably: it’s not only that fewer schools are willing to offer the qualification at all, it’s that the qualification which survives that first cull has been quietly reshaping itself, over decades, in a direction that privileges exactly the kind of prior cultural and linguistic capital that a young-person-centred ecosystem model would want us to treat as unevenly distributed to begin with.

We come back to the purpose of music in schools (thanks, Janet Mills); all of these considerations require contemplation of why we teach music in schools. Many of us in the classroom will see cultivating a pipeline to KS4 important (but we all would say the logistical demands of the coursework meant we never were after a whole Year 10 year group taking GCSE, though that would have been a joy). But knowing so many do not opt to continue musical studies in the classroom it makes framing KS3 curriculum as a pipeline project difficult to sustain.

If the exam (KS4 and KS5) is one of the ‘filters or gatekeepers’ this ecosystem model of Whittaker et al. places between a young person and the wider ecosystem (and the authors are explicit that this is how they intend the concentric layers to be read) then the internal architecture of the exam deserves the same scrutiny as who gets access to sit it. Access without a genuinely accessible assessment structure at the other end of that access is only half the fix.

Perhaps we will see GCSE reforms coming, particular with recent announcements about technical education; another topic music/arts educators will be intensely interested in, particular as we grapple with the fluidity with which our subjects sit within the academic and the technical domains.

More to come.