Why does the school exam system not work for us any more? Has it Jumped The Shark?

Learners, families, and stakeholders are rejecting England’s school assessment system. A recent letter to a UK newspaper noted the actions of distressed families and learners was a function of them, "...trying to modernise, often unknowingly, an archaic and somewhat arbitrary educational assessment system."

That’s quite a statement in June 2025, when hundreds of thousands of learners are taking their exams at this moment. But why doesn’t the system work?

a) The SEN Tsunami The snowballing of SEN diagnoses and soaring demands upon school exam officers to provide exam accommodation requests is well known. One-third of learners are now awarded 25% extra exam time. But clumsily narrowing the SEN accommodation goalpost thresholds is a mere triage. Digital exam advocates offer upfront and on-the-fly flexibility for SEN accommodations. Paper will continue to lock those learners out; ‘othering’ them to their peers and colleagues. The system doesn’t work for them.

b) Evolving Societal Norms This means that users have different expectations of a service encounter. Just as university student accommodation isn’t like The Young Ones any more, the school exam system malaise is partly due to mismatched (young) learner expectations, the societal norms of 2025, and senior folks who run exam programmes.

This is also manifested by exam owners dragging their feet on providing ways for learners to input to exam development and delivery. Great service design involves its users. While one part of the UK government has embraced that for 10 years, it still eludes exam delivery.

School exam delivery is creaking under behind-the-times ICE documents, scurrying for Parcelforce slots, and exams officers proudly writing ‘Word Processed’ on a freshly printed exam script. Like a TV show that jumped the shark years ago, why has this long-running tragi-comedy not been put out of its misery for the sake of learners?

School exam delivery is creaking and jumped the shark years ago. Can we put it out of its misery now?

c) Parents Going Legal Access to justice in England can be a thorny topic. But digital empowerment and the normalisation of no-win-no-fee legal services make a heady brew for parents who believe their child has been wronged. And they’re not as deferential as they used to be. Going legal, when all other reasonable efforts have failed, is a symptom of a system that doesn’t work for learners.

d) The School Exam Money Pit Too many England educators catastrophise about digital, while their schools spend increasingly huge sums of cash. The inexorable rise in exam fees. Re-sit fees. (Re)marking of paper scripts. Paying twice for the acknowledged imperfect marking where one in four grades is wrong. Are we acquiescing that this is just priced in as a cost of doing education?

It’s hard for educators and school leaders to comprehend above-inflation exam fee price hikes, when they see those exam owners go on an acquisition spree. Where are the digital transformation programmes that other sectors deliver to spend smarter?

Money pit

High stakes, supervised assessment with reliable outcomes costs money. But did you know some countries provide school exams free of charge to enhance learner equity? The cost needs to be found from somewhere, but for at-the-point-usage, that’s helpful to learners.

Are we guilty of just pricing in the cost of resits, remarks, and imperfect marking as a cost of doing education?

e) No Target (Digital) Operating Model No one has publicly proposed scalable models for digital exam delivery in England’s schools. Despite huge sums of money on staff, big consultancies, and policy folk, we’ve only seen very modest, incremental contributions. Mild tinkering to tamp-the-issue-down until the next time.

So what is the target operating model for digital? Not just ‘paper-behind-glass’ that we’ve been doing for 30 years. Or ‘weaving digital formative to prep for summative’ that already happens in Wales. England’s regulator approves about a dozen assessment instruments – many were digitised years ago.

If your company is into digital transformation, there’s an open goal to design a Target Operating Model for school digital assessment, integrating existing solutions. Don’t forget to include learners.

f) I don’t understand assessment either As a parent, have you tried to decode a Progress 8 report or the output from a Key Stage test? If you’re an hiring employer, is a Grade 1 or 9 the best GCSE grade? Can you fail a GCSE? Who cares about a Scholarship Level distinction anyway? Utterly bamboozling.

A cynic might say the reports are complicated-by-design to brush away tricky parental questions. It’s laudable to ask for better parental engagement with assessment. But obscure and opaque reporting is harmful and disengaging. The black box of examining, marking, moderation, standardisation, etc., feeds the school assessment beast, and keeps learners and families in the dark behind obfuscation and circumlocution.

A black box of examining, marking, moderation, and standardisation keeps learners in the dark.

With social attitudes and trust in government decaying, remember that digital exams and assessment give full transparency, accessibility, and equity for all. Learners deserve that, but some people don’t want it.

g) England’s Exceptionalism – we always know best There’s a growing grass-roots realisation that England’s exams ain’t all that any more. Too expensive. Too slow to deploy. Weak outcomes. And no digital delivery option? The sheer arrogance of some policy folk, pundits and protectionists in deriding another country’s assessment system (usually in defending their employer’s position, and selling it as wisdom), deserves a harsher spotlight. Plus, it doesn’t help learners.

h) We’re cuddly charities, but have you seen what we’ve bought? Many exam owners claim Third Sector status, but exhibit many full-blooded commercial characteristics. It’s becoming increasingly disingenuous to justify school exam price rises by claiming ‘not-for-profit’ status, with fees heartily reinvested into ‘education and research’. But then go full Viv Nicholson with the cash, with a public cos-playing as ‘digital innovators’ that rubs against their company culture. Especially when they’ve had decades to make a better system for learners

Cos-playing as digital innovators by splashing cash cannot overcome company culture as a paper-based ancien régime operator.

Public attitudes towards charities and not-for-profits is quickly evolving. Playing the charity card is starting to become tiresome. Goodwill is difficult to acquire, and easy to lose, especially when learners do not benefit.

I) Where’s the leadership? When England’s regulator-in-chief is a former headteacher, rest assured that’s the community he’ll be prioritising. When someone says that digital is ‘not economic’ and we ‘throw pen and paper away at our peril’, he’s happy with the way things are, and doesn’t want to create waves or impactful change.

After all, our assessment leaders have been ‘exploring options’ for three years, and promised digital will ‘touch the life of every learner’ two decades ago. So you can forgive learners when they think assessment leadership has a credibility problem. Does this work for learners any more? I’ve seen schools vote with their money for a different way. And everyone else will shrug, put up with it, and keep throwing their money down the pit.