"It is difficult if not impossible to see any way in which exam-based assessment next summer can be fair or equitable." - Sir Alasdair Macdonald, Chair of the New Visions for Education Group, September 2020. Read his article here.
A Special Conference of the National Education Union today (3 October 2020) agreed:
Conference believes that GCSEs, A Levels and BTECs are clearly unfit for purpose in assessing in any meaningful and fair way student learning and that an alternative urgently needs to be developed and established
Conference instructs the Executive to commission and produce a series of articles, pamphlets and other materials putting the case for an end to norm referenced GCSEs and their replacement by criteria-based assessment and an alternative to A Levels and BTECs
Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian -
‘The regime of perennial assessment so beloved of our politicians is an absurdity that actively damages young people’.
2021 GCSE exams scrapped in Wales - Times Education Supplement
https://www.tes.com/news/gcse-and-level-2021-exams-scrapped-wales
The Welsh Minister of Education’s statement
https://twitter.com/wgmin_education/status/1326132748663152641?s=20