You Can’t Resit Your Way to Ambition

GCSE resits have their place. But young people also need a reason to care.

I hated maths. I always did. English was completely different. Give me An Inspector Calls and I could happily spend a lesson arguing about whether Mr Birling was awful. Give me an equation containing letters and numbers at the same time and I wanted to know who had allowed the alphabet into maths in the first place.

Being creative, writing stories and having debates was my thing. Algebra, shapes and equations were not. My philosophy throughout most of secondary school was fairly simple: if I didn’t like it, I wasn’t going to do it. I was also quite a naughty kid. Our maths class could be chaos. There was a lot of talking, messing around and a surprising number of glue sticks flying across the room. And I was hardly an innocent bystander. Trust me, I was very much involved.

Then, around the middle of Year 10, I remember thinking: God, I actually need to get myself together. I’d discovered politics and knew which Sixth Form I wanted to go to. Suddenly there was something I wanted at the end of school. There was just one fairly major problem: maths.

I needed a grade 4, roughly equivalent to the old C grade. In my December mocks I got a low 2. By my final mocks I’d dragged myself up to a high 2. If I didn’t get a 4, I wouldn’t get into the sixth form I wanted. And, almost as terrifyingly, I’d have to resit maths. Nothing motivates somebody who hates maths quite like the prospect of having to do even more maths.

So I bought revision books, stayed after school and was fortunate that my parents got me a maths tutor a few months before the exam. She worked me out quickly. I remember her telling my mum: “Ellie hates shapes. She hasn’t got a clue about them. There’ll be one question on them, so I’m focusing on everything else.”

Brutal, but effective. We weren’t trying to turn me into a mathematician. We were trying to get me a 4. And I passed, which is slightly inconvenient for the argument I’m about to make.

GCSE resits are back in the conversation after another miserable set of results this summer. Just 15.3% of post-16 GCSE maths resit entrants achieved a grade 4 or above. Fewer than one in six.

Since 2014, funding rules have required most young people who leave school without a grade 4 in English or maths to continue studying those subjects in post-16 education. The principle is sensible. We don’t want teenagers entering adult life unable to read, write or use basic maths. But more than a decade later, it seems reasonable to ask whether repeatedly returning young people to the same qualification is always the answer.

My own experience means I can’t simply say resits are pointless. The threat of one worked on me. But then there’s my friend Daniel.

Daniel was in the same maths set as me. When I rang him while writing this, we talked about how different the atmosphere could be between the top and bottom sets. Ours was one of the lower ones. Sometimes getting everyone to engage with the lesson was half the battle. In our class, the teacher could spend half the lesson trying to stop glue sticks from hitting somebody in the head. That obviously leaves a lot less time for actually teaching maths.

That doesn’t mean the kids in lower sets were stupid. Some struggled. Some didn’t care. Some probably had things going on outside school. And some, like me, were perfectly capable of doing better but weren’t particularly interested.

Daniel got a 3 in his GCSE. On paper, he’s exactly the sort of pupil for whom a resit should work. Except he resat it and got a 2. He’s now 18 and still studying maths at college, with a three-hour lesson once a week before sitting the exam again.

When I asked what he thought about it, he wasn’t furious. He just didn’t really care. His attitude was basically: “What’s the point in me doing this?” That almost says more than a five-minute rant would.

Daniel’s experience doesn’t prove resits don’t work any more than mine proves they do. Government figures show how difficult the problem is. Among the latest cohort, 35.4% of young people who got a grade 3 in maths at 16 had gone on to achieve the required standard, a grade 4 or equivalent, by 19. Among those who started with a grade 2, just 7.7% had reached that standard.

There is something slightly bizarre about the power we’ve given that magic number 4. You could be brilliant at English and history, hopeless at maths and science, and still be highly capable academically. Yet fail GCSE maths and you can find doors closing in subjects that have almost nothing to do with it.

If somebody wants to study engineering, economics or mathematics, obviously mathematical ability matters. But why should exactly the same qualification act as a universal gatekeeper for somebody whose abilities lie elsewhere?

Staffordshire University famously offered a module which included studying David Beckham and football culture. So we managed to construct an education system in which studying David Beckham could be academically legitimate, while an inability to pass GCSE maths could still close the door to studying something you were actually brilliant at.

I wanted to study politics. I needed to understand percentages, statistics and numbers. I did not need to love algebra or know my way around every shape known to mankind. I wasn’t planning to calculate the circumference of Keir Starmer’s head.

There’s another problem with treating GCSE results as a straightforward measure of ability: the environment in which those results are produced.

This summer, 88.4% of GCSE results at independent schools were grade 4 or above, compared with 66.1% across state-funded schools. That obviously doesn’t mean private-school teachers are simply better. It raises a more interesting question about how much opportunity teachers actually have to teach.

A teacher at my old state school told me there is now “barely any time to be an actual teacher anymore”. So much of the job can be taken up dealing with behaviour, pastoral problems and everything else going on in pupils’ lives. I knew exactly what she meant. I’d been one of the pupils creating the problem.

My friend Albert’s experience shows how much environment can matter. His secondary school experience, by his recollection, was chaotic. Teachers changed constantly, there were supply teachers, disrupted lessons and fights. For a lot of subjects, he basically taught himself the material at home.

Perhaps the most telling detail came when he collected his GCSE results. His head of year asked him his name. Five years. Didn’t know his name.

Albert left with mostly 4s and 5s. Then he went to a different sixth form, developed a passion for English and went on an Oxford taster day. He loved it. Suddenly Oxford wasn’t some abstract place full of people completely different from him. He could actually see himself there.

He started sixth form around D, C, C and finished with A*, A and B. He’s now going to Oxford to study English.

Albert didn’t suddenly become more intelligent at 17, just as I didn’t suddenly become more intelligent when I turned a 2 into a 4. What changed was our environment, our motivation and the fact that we had something we actually wanted to work towards.

Albert remembers an outside careers adviser coming into his school once. Pupils got around 15 minutes to talk about what they wanted to do. There was one slight problem: most of them had absolutely no idea. Of course they didn’t. They were 15.

It’s very difficult to be ambitious about a life you’ve never actually seen.

We spend years telling teenagers their GCSEs are important. Perhaps we need to get much better at showing them what they’re important for. Show them universities. Show them apprenticeships. Take them into workplaces. Show them vocational colleges and trades. Give them proper work experience. Let them meet people doing jobs they didn’t even know existed.

I went to Sixth Form and then left. I built my own route into politics and the media through work experience and actually doing the job. Albert is going to Oxford. Our routes couldn’t look much more different. But both of us found something we wanted badly enough to work for.

Daniel is still sitting in a three-hour maths lesson once a week asking: “What’s the point?”

And that, to me, is the real question behind the GCSE resit debate. I don’t want to lower standards. Every young person should leave education able to read, write and use basic maths confidently. I don’t want to abolish resits either. The threat of one helped get a girl who scored a low 2 in her December mocks to a 4 in the real exam.

But you cannot resit your way to ambition.

For some young people, another attempt at GCSE is exactly right. For others who repeatedly struggle, there should be respected alternative ways to demonstrate literacy and numeracy, rather than repeatedly sending them back to the same GCSE paper. And alongside all of that, we need to get much better at showing young people what they might actually be working towards.

Perhaps we’ve become so focused on asking how to make teenagers pass that we’ve neglected to ask what might make them want to.

Sometimes the difference between a teenager who doesn’t care and one who will work ridiculously hard isn’t intelligence. It’s having something worth working towards.