“Change to the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is urgently needed, to address an overloaded curriculum, a disproportionate exam burden and declining opportunities to study creative and technical subjects.”Īnother member of the committee, the former education secretary Kenneth Baker, said dropping the EBacc would give schools greater freedom to decide which subjects they wanted to teach. “The evidence we have received is compelling,” said the former Conservative education minister Jo Johnson, who chairs the committee. It is also in favour of more on-screen assessment in GCSE exams. The report also calls on the government to consider cutting the amount of external assessment undertaken by pupils during key stage 4 and introducing more non-exam assessments. Pupils should also have the option to take functional literacy and numeracy qualifications that are equal in value to GCSE English and maths. It says there should be more opportunities to study creative, cultural, vocational and technical subjects. The committee recommends instead that schools and teachers should be allowed to offer a more varied range of learning experiences, to help pupils develop a broader set of skills that will better meet the needs of a future digital and green economy. The criticisms by the Lords education for 11- to 16-year-olds cross-party committee echo many of the concerns raised over the years by school leaders, academics and unions in response to the series of changes introduced by the Conservative government. The report also challenges the government’s focus on a “knowledge-rich” approach, complaining it has resulted in a curriculum that is “overburdened” with content, which is then examined by 25 to 30 hours of assessment at the end of year 11. “Opportunities to experience more practical, applied forms of learning have become increasingly limited, even though many pupils enjoy, and excel in, this way of acquiring knowledge and skills,” the report says. However, the criticism has been that in pursuing such a limited range of subjects there has been a dramatic decline in other subjects. The government’s ambition was that 90% of year 10 pupils should enter the English baccalaureate, or Ebacc, by 2025. Published on Tuesday, the report also calls for the English baccalaureate, introduced by the then education secretary Michael Gove as a school performance measure to encourage the uptake of a narrow suite of academic subjects, to be scrapped.
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