Pepe Di’Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, comments on the publication of level 2 results.
“Congratulations to students and their teachers on this year’s results in GCSEs and vocational and technical qualifications. This is the culmination of a huge amount of hard work.
“These students experienced a great deal of disruption earlier in their time at school as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Schools strained every sinew to support those who have needed additional help to catch up and to tackle the lingering impact of the pandemic on attendance rates. However, it has not been easy, and the previous government did not put enough investment or focus into educational recovery.
“Disadvantaged students were often those most severely affected by the disruption of Covid and that has made it even more difficult to close gaps in educational attainment caused by socioeconomic factors. Those gaps are reflected in regional disparities evident once again in this year’s results. We simply must do more to invest – educationally, economically, and socially – in communities suffering from generational disadvantage.
“Once again we see that the majority of students who retake GCSE English and maths in post-16 education under a government policy of mandatory resits continue to fall short of a Grade 4 standard pass. It is utterly demoralising for these young people and there has to be a better way of supporting literacy and numeracy. We urge the curriculum and assessment review to grasp this nettle.
“We continue to see entries fall in certain GCSE subjects, highlighting the need to rebalance the curriculum. The previous government’s focus on a core set of traditional academic subjects in school performance tables has served to increasingly squeeze out other subjects. The number of entries to design and technology has fallen again and has now decreased by nearly 200,000 in England since 2010. Drama and media studies are also down on top of steep declines over the past 15 years. We hope that the curriculum and assessment review will bring forward recommendations on how creative arts and technology subjects can be better recognised and supported in the future. They are both culturally important and vital components of the country’s economy.
“French and German continue to be a source of concern with entries declining in both subjects. The rising popularity of Spanish is great to see, but we cannot escape the fact that over the past 20 years or so there has been a massive decline in language take-up overall.
“It is imperative that we find ways of promoting a love of languages or we will become an increasingly monolingual society with consequent implications for our ability to trade and travel abroad.”