GCSE Subject Content Announcement: A Personal Response

It was an unpleasant surprise to discover on Friday 14th January 22  that the DfE had published the final GCSE Subject Content for French, German and Spanish without the usual advance notice which is usually given as a courtesy to Communication Teams of stakeholders such as ALL, as well as the national media who were very unhappy and curious about this breach of protocol.  

 Changes to subject content are usually made in the context of a new set of requirements set for all subjects.  There have been no changes in requirements.  The National Curriculum has not changed.  French German and Spanish are the only GCSE subjects being changed. The reason given was that it was necessary to change the exam to increase ML take-up, but as Geoff Barton from ASCL said “At a time when pupils need to be enthused to learn languages, the government has chosen to make GCSEs both prescriptive and grinding. The idea that this will help it fulfil its target of 90% of pupils taking up these subjects is pure fantasy.” even though Ofsted are using the "stick" of EBacc ambition to incentivise schools to increase the percentage.

 Traditionally subject associations are invited to be part of a collaborative consultation process when new Subject Content is discussed. The process on this occasion has been pointedly designed to exclude stakeholders and experts, including awarding bodies who are expert in the field of assessment.

 Naturally I share the deep disappointment of the ALL Management Board [link to press statement here] (and I am sure of the 1,000+ signatories of the APPG statement) that the Department of Education has not taken up the invitation by subject associations, exam boards and headteacher unions to bring all stakeholders together to work collaboratively in a second review phase for the GCSE content design and development in the light of the concerns expressed by so many. 

 It is very clear that there is no need for such a radical change.  There was sufficient agreement on specific flaws of the current subject content to make some ‘tweaks’ e.g. removing target language questions, requiring high frequency words in word lists, removing the requirement to introduce unknown words into an assessment.  This would have improved the experience of the pupils and could have been enacted quickly without making changes which are going to impose a massive workload on teachers to no benefit, and indeed will be detrimental.

 I have compared the proposed and final content here and will later publish a comparison between current (2015) and final (2022). https://helenmyers.blogspot.com/2022/01/subject-content-french-german-spanish.html

 The content has been changed radically from the current subject content.  Analysis shows that there have been some small concessions to concerns raised, but the key concerns about the artificial limits imposed on the selection of vocabulary and the focus on knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and phonetics rather than ability to communicate and understand have not been addressed.  The awarding bodies requested as a compromise that the limit be changed to 80% of the top 3,000 words as this would make creating meaningful tasks less artificial, but the DfE have not moved from their insistence that the top 2,000 words only are to be categorised as high frequency, and have only conceded 5% additional words outside that limit. Although there is an additional allowance for 20 culture-related words, this will not be enough to address the concern about having sufficient words needed to do meaningful tasks on a range of themes.

 I can still remember the pleasure of being able to encourage learners of all abilities when the then ‘new’ GCSE came in in 1988, when I could say that they would be rewarded for communicating a message rather than needing to be totally accurate and precise.  I hope that awarding bodies will have the scope to be able to produce mark schemes which are inclusive so that we can reward all for what they know, understand and can do.  The subject content of 2022 and its associated assessment requirements are not going to facilitate this task.

 My great worry is the very clear link between this Subject Content and the Ofsted ML Curriculum Review "high-quality teaching may" statements which promote a very limiting pedagogy, which one could describe as the Latinisation of ML, so contrary to the emphasis on encouraging pupils of all abilities to study a language to communicate rather than a dry puzzle to be solved.

 But the most important issue is that until severe grading is addressed, whatever pedagogy we use, whatever exam we have, there will be little incentive for more pupils to study GCSE MFL.