Can’t speak, won’t speak

I noticed this story on the BCC website the other day. It discusses how oral exams could be dropped from foreign language GCSEs because they are “too stressful”.

If this went ahead, it would be possible to get a pass in a foreign language even though you’ve neither written nor spoken a word of it under exam conditions. Unbelievable.

Children need to understand that exams are supposed to be a bit stressful. Getting a good grade is obviously important, but what you learn from dealing with these stressful tests is the ability to better handle stress in real-life.

What is happening in schools? As a complete outsider to the education system, it appears to me that all the difficult stuff is being taken out of the curriculum. This is crazy. Kids don’t become better people when we make things easier for them: overcoming difficulties is crucial to character building and we seem to be very keen to completely obliterate it from school life. Are we now churning out softies?

I’m all for continuous assessment if it genuinely tracks every pupil’s progress. But exams, stressful or otherwise, do in fact give you a good indication of the capability of a child. I was a reasonably intelligent pupil, but I hated exams and wasn’t very good at them. Yet I never claimed they were too stressful and I managed to get good grades – incidentally as the first year of people to take GCSEs after ‘O Levels’ were shelved.

If an otherwise bright child fails an exam because it’s too stressful, there is something else going on, it’s not simply the stress of the day. I’d argue that if kids are failing due to ‘stress’ then they have been failed by a system that didn’t understand their individual learning needs or their personal circumstances in the first place.