Don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it's gone? Skills-led qualifications, secondary school attainment and policy choices

Abstract

In the name of curriculum breadth and raising standards, recent government policy in England has removed a large number of non-academic qualifications from the list of those that secondary schools can count in league tables, discouraging their use. Most of these were vocational qualifications, but they also include skills-led qualifications. This paper reports mixed methods research investigating the relationship between mainstream secondary school qualifications in England and a specific, widely used skills-led qualification: the Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE). Neither academic nor vocational, CoPE requires learners to assemble a portfolio of evidence in response to ‘challenges’ negotiated with the teacher. It is designed to promote a reflective learning orientation and to develop (and assess) skills that underpin learning and future employability. We use a combination of regression analysis, pseudo-experiment and qualitative case study. Our research shows that CoPE is associated with improved outcomes in the ‘mainstream’ academic qualifications often regarded as the benchmark for the quality of schools and much of what goes on in them. Thus, we argue that certain reforms designed to raise standards are likely to depress attainment in the very qualifications deemed as core indicators of educational standards.

Keywords:

• GCSEs
• ASDAN
• attainment
• learning orientations
• inequality
• standards

Acknowledgement

It is important to acknowledge that this study was funded by ASDAN. Their only other role was the provision of contacts from which the case study schools were chosen. The authors were initially all based at the University of the West of England (UWE), which has an historical relationship with ASDAN – the latter being established by staff from the former. The founding CEO of ASDAN (Roger White OBE) left UWE in 2002 and had retired from ASDAN by the time of the study. The spouse of one of the authors was formerly employed by ASDAN, but had no role in the conception, commissioning or carrying out of this study. As such, the authors (and their institutions) were entirely independent of ASDAN with respect to this study and assert that no conflict of interest exists.

Notes

1. The English Baccalaureate (EB) is not a distinct curriculum entity, but rather a further narrowing of the ‘threshold’ measure already mentioned in this paper: GCSE A* to C passes comprising English, mathematics, science, a language and a humanities subject. The EB was presented by the Government as defending breadth and as a way of addressing a perceived decline in standards, though for some commentators it promised the exact opposite of both of these things (UK Parliament 2011).

2. In logistic regression models, the ‘odds ratio’ is often used as a readily understood measure of effect size, being related to the relative likelihood of a positive outcome (i.e. achieving a good pass) given a certain value of the explanatory variable, when compared to a reference category. Indeed, when the outcome of interest is rare (i.e. achieved by fewer than 10% of the sample), the odds ratio can be used directly as an estimate for the relative likelihood. However, both the outcome variables in this study are relatively common (i.e. there are high pass rates). In this situation, the odds ratio ceases to be a good estimate for the relative likelihood, and so Zhang and Yu’s (1998) adjustment is used to provide a more accurate estimate:

Estimated RL =  (where RL is the relative likelihood, OR is the odds ratio and P is proportion of individuals in the group of interest – i.e. the overall pass rate).