The Lucy Powell argument is that children from poorer backgrounds and with special needs have suffered as a result of the Gove reforms because many of them do badly at GCSE and end up unemployed.
Where does the truth lie?
Gove got rid of ‘vocational alternatives’ to GCSEs because of clear evidence that they were too easy. Because they were easier than GCSEs and yet counted as GCSEs in the league tables many schools put pupils in for them. As a result these pupils missed out on core GCSE subjects like history or music or French which might have been more useful when applying to university. An example of a vocational equivalent was the European Computer Driving Licence, which was taken by 20% of pupils and could be taught in a weekend.
The Wolf Review in 2011 confirmed that 14- to 16-year-old pupils were being encouraged to take “low-level” vocational qualifications of little value to employers. A study by data analysts Simon Burgess and Dave Thompson found that pupils on free school meals were most likely to take these qualifications.
So the lesson of this experience is twofold: if you inject new vocational subjects into the Key Stage 4 curriculum, make sure they are not much easier than standard GCSEs. And remember, if a child takes a vocational subject that certainly means there is another GCSE subject they are not taking. They are not taking the diet of subjects being taken by pupils at grammar schools and independent schools.
Gove introduced a league table measure called the English Baccalaureate (EBacc). Schools were not forced to conform to the Ebacc but their league table position was influenced by it. The Ebacc was a measure of results by pupil in GCSE English, maths, science, humanities (history or geography), and a foreign language. These GCSE subjects were those most likely to lead to the sort of A-level subjects demanded by good universities. Research evidence showed that schools were putting bright working-class children in for vocational options and this was limiting their ability to apply to good universities later on.
The EBacc has been a focus of criticism because it seemed to downgrade the importance of creative arts subjects. That might be fair, but in the context of this discussion the key issue is a different one: that teachers, left to their own devices, were damaging the prospects of some bright pupils by putting them in for the ‘wrong’ subjects.
Some pupils do take vocational subjects in Key Stage 4 now. In 2026 the most popular subjects were sports studies (60,000 entries), health studies (55,000), computer-related subjects (49,000) and hospitality/catering (39,000). Most of these were BTECs or Cambridge Nationals.
Why do too many children do badly in their GCSEs?
Some of these children lack the academic ability and level of motivation to cope with GCSEs. They struggle to read in primary school and because they are behind at reading they find it hard to access the curriculum in secondary school. Some receive little support from their parents and have high levels of absenteeism.
We are told that ‘all pupils can do well’ but every class in every school has a range of ability and some pupils do better than others. Even in the schools with the best GCSE results in England there is a tail of lower achievement.
It is wrong to think that those pupils who did badly at GCSE would have been fine if only they had taken vocational equivalents of similar demand to academic GCSEs. Those pupils who fail to turn up to school regularly, have limited ability or are lazy, will do just as badly with vocational alternatives. GCSEs are quite easy for a child of average intelligence and work ethic.
GCSEs exist to motivate children to work, to memorise and to provide a sensible system of grading which flags to schools, colleges, universities and employers which young people are able and hardworking and which are not. Those children who do not pass GCSEs are generally bad at the subjects they fail, as I was when I failed O-level French.
Gove made GCSE syllabuses and exams a bit more demanding because of evidence that millions of children in East Asia were learning more than children In England. This reform was a success – our teachers and children rose to the challenge and our average results improved significantly. But it still left a tail of very weak performers, and it is this group we should concentrate on now.
Why do a third of young people fail GCSE English and maths? Because for many years Ofqual has tried to prevent grade inflation by holding steady the proportion of students getting each grade, with different subjects having different grade distributions. This is absolutely correct for two reasons: first, a pupil who currently fails a GCSE (that is, below grade 4) is undeniably weak. The answers they write are poor. They don’t deserve to pass.
Secondly, grade inflation rapidly damages the value of a qualification as the currency is eroded. So the starting point of GCSE grading is the grade distribution which pertained before Covid, in 2019.
But there are two ways that Ofqual can move away from the 2019 grade distribution. One is using the National Reference Test – a large sample of pupils sit the same Maths and English tests every year and they indicate if the underlying performance has gone up or down. If the performance goes up significantly Ofqual can increase the proportion of candidates getting better grades.
Secondly, chief examiners in every exam board can make the case for pushing up (or down) the grades by comparing the performance of pupils this year with that of previous years at each grade boundary. If Ofqual is persuaded they will make that adjustment. This is quite common with subjects with smaller numbers of candidates, where the average performance can certainly change from one year to the next.
But it is important not to push up grades unless there is clear evidence that the performance of pupils has improved. Another way of looking at this matter is to read samples of exam scripts which have been given grade 3 (fail) or below. If you do that you can see that these pupils are indeed really weak. They deserve the grade they got. To give them a pass grade would undermine the very meaning of the qualification and would deceive those people who use these qualifications to make decisions.
So the Government’s plan to introduce a level 1 stepping-stone qualification for those who are this bad at maths or English is a good one. Lucy Powell is right that we need to look after what ASCL called ‘the forgotten third’ who fail these subjects and find it so hard to improve by resitting. One of the things we need to do for this large group (29% failed English and Maths at age 16 this year) is to present them with a qualification they can more easily pass in the hope that this will encourage them. At the heart of all successful teaching is a sense of hope which drives pupil motivation.
It is worth thinking for a moment about design technology GCSE. This is a useful subject which children who are ‘good with their hands’ should be studying. Yet no subject has declined faster in England in the past twenty years than GCSE design tech. Why?
First, because demand from pupils was low. Pupils are forced to take English, maths and two to three sciences. That typically leaves room for three other subjects, sometimes four. These are the optional subjects, chosen when a child is 13 or 14. DT is an optional subject and is in competition with history, geography, religious studies, art, music, drama, PE, dance and modern languages.
Secondly, it is hard to find teachers of DT. Of course it is.
Thirdly, DT is expensive to run because it needs quite large workshops and storage areas to be effective. State schools have not been given the money. That is why some of the biggest and most effective DT departments are in private schools.
The Burnham idea of a pathway to jobs for those who are unlikely to go to university is a reasonable one. It must be true that if we can create vocational courses that are useful, if we can find good teachers of those courses, if these pupils can be persuaded to turn up at school and do some work, then that is better than forcing them all to take French or history GCSE which they will fail. That will be particularly the case if the vocational courses lead to jobs in local employers, like those young people at Yeovil College who go on to work in the local helicopter factory.
But not many places are like Yeovil. If you live in a remote rural area or in a town with a depressed economy, you will find it much harder to identify, at the age of 13/14, a course at school which might lead to a local job.
This is why all the research shows that improving local economies – creating jobs – is a far better way of reducing youth unemployment than changing the school curriculum. The actions taken by Rachel Reeves have greatly reduced the incentives for employers to recruit young workers and need to be modified.
What about reducing the emphasis on end-of-course exams? Twenty years ago we looked at this issue and came to the firm conclusion that end-of-course invigilated exams were much the fairest way of assessing pupils in most subjects. The alternative, coursework done in the classroom or at home, is very vulnerable to cheating – teachers giving too much help, parents writing the work, AI-generated answers.
Creating vocational GCSEs will be expensive and slow and immensely difficult to scale across thousands of schools who have no suitable teachers. Most 13-14-year-old children do not know what jobs they might want to do and most would benefit from more and better English and maths teaching. Academically-inclined pupils will not choose the vocational options and for that reason alone they may be regarded as qualifications for the less able.
Whatever happens, the priority is probably to improve the vocational options for the post-16 cohorts – let’s call them V-levels.
By Professor Barnaby Lenon, Dean of the Faculty of Education at The University of Buckingham