Testing times

Young people first. This is a year when they deserve special support. There are fewer university places available. Results are released later than usual. A ‘trading up’ period of dubious usefulness has been added for political reasons to the usual period of clearing. Special degrees of watchfulness, initiative and support are undoubtedly called for.

There is a big advantage in getting the results early. The UCAS website opens earlier than most schools and colleges, so most university applicants will be able to find out online what their chosen universities have decided about them. For those who are disappointed, teachers, quickly accessed, provide the best source of advice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is often those students who most need help who arrive the latest in search of it — sometimes even with a mobile lacking battery and credit. This year more than any a proactive approach will pay dividends Pressure to do well in exams increases every year. Regrettably, sympathy for those who take them is soon overtaken on results day by some commentators who seek to question achievement. Each year there will be at least one public figure lamenting that standards are falling, and taking a general delight in dampening spirits. This year looks set fair to be worse than most. This criticism is often based on an inability to understand what an ALevel represents.

Public exams, looked at in one way, are a currency: their value resides in their ability to give access to a particular university place or job. Commentators talk in reverent tones about an academic gold standard, forgetting that this totemic economic instrument was abandoned in the UK and other world economies several decades ago.

It can hardly be a surprise if exam currencies, like other currencies, require revaluation from time-to-time. The A*, being introduced in 2010, will perform this function: we should bemoan the delay in its introduction, regret the pusillanimity that is delaying its implementation, and lament the fact that the ill consequences of the inactivity of adults have now, for several years, been being visited on the younger generation. Their hard work deserves sympathy not belittlement.

Properly looked at, of course, exams do serve a much broader purpose. They are an inescapable part of a real education, however great a tendency there may be to reduce them to a series of limited academic tests.Without doubt, this aspect of all our exams is less satisfactory.

The obsession with testing, prevalent especially in the UK, has tended in recent years to obscure the wider purpose of Sixth Form study. The focus has increasingly been on ticking boxes, not on stretching the mind by moving beyond the syllabus. Increasingly, some schools are seeking to counteract this tendency by ensuring that they broaden their provision beyond A-Levels, the IB and all the other traditional qualifications. Next September at Magdalen College School we will be devoting one afternoon a week exclusively to something we are calling Waynflete Studies. The aim is to allow every sixth former to identify a research project of their own, something that really interests and inspires them, and to supervise that project first of all in school, but then by employing those who teach in the university to add that final bit of imagination and stretch.

Waynflete Studies is unique. We believe that it is central to our identity and mission — as a school at the centre of a globally-renowned university and founded by a remarkable man, William Waynflete, who wished to ensure that secondary and tertiary education were intimately linked.

There is lot of devil in the detail, but we hope that a symbolic and practical way to a broader future has already been boldly and carefully prepared. That, however, is next year. Today is a day for the present.

Let’s all spare a thought for those awaiting their results, and congratulate them on all the hard work that underlies them.

Let us not forget the wonderful service provided by UCAS, an organisation whose praises are far too infrequently sung. And let us not forget the other side of the results coin, the considerable headaches there are for universities faced with ever-increasing political pressure and strategic uncertainty. It is a hard time for admissions offices too.

This is the end of my first full year at MCS. Thanks to the generosity of the Head of English here, I am allowed to teach everyone in the Lower Sixth who studies A-Level English. This year, as AS results come in, I shall also be among the anxious parties. Fingers crossed.