A six-unit structure applies to all the new GCE specifications. I do not agree with the QCA that the advantage of a common structure across the subjects outweighs the disadvantages. Concerns from art teachers about such a structure were brushed aside during a mistimed, too- short consultation period. Bureaucratic convenience is to take precedence over published research on the dangers of a framework which results in “teaching to the test”.
Art is important as a necessarily divergent foil to the convergent curricular core. Art students need elbow room for the pursuit of a personal aesthetic and a modular straitjacket does them no favours at all.
I have watched my brightest students struggle to reconcile their desire to produce idiosyncratic work of substance with the need to jump through the circumscribed hoops necessary for the all-important grades. Risky experimentation and open-ended exploration were reduced to a minimum and it seemed as though the course had been deliberately designed to reward mediocrity. That joy at seeing students transcend the shackles of the syllabus, the Wow! factor, will become a rarity.
Hermetically sealed separate units and the requirement to reprove skills in each dedicated sketchbook make things even worse.
And disallowing the resubmission of AS material as prep for units at A2 means that finished work in Year 13 will not be seen in the context of its development.
We are told that, as regards expected standards, the exam will “find its own level” following an analysis of the first year’s submission.
Teachers, flying blind, will have squeezed blood from hard-pressed students in order to ensure grades in a year without reference to prior exemplar material. Such a level of expectation cannot be sustained.
The standard will be artificially high as we will have inflated grade expectations. A system which allows modular students to be assessed in the same category as those assessed at the end of the course is unfair on the former.
I believe that when the national curriculum was first imposed its constraints were recognised and tackled at classroom level and the efforts of teachers not only prevented the mechanistic nightmare evoked on paper but improved on the brief while retrieving ownership of the process. Such imaginative and subversive fine-tuning is required again. The equal weighting for all objectives has led to the rewarding of the spurious over the essential and, in the language of the new taxonomy, “fluency” is achievable at GCSE and at A2, but not at AS.
Exam boards will offer strategies to side-step difficulties and suggest that flexibility is possible with astute juggling, but why should teachers spend valuable time trying to circumvent a bad syllabus? Where will the current guardians of standards be if everyone opts for the International Baccalaureate?
TOM HARDY Tom Hardy is head of art at North London Collegiate School, Edgware.E-mail: thardy@nlcs.harrow.sch.uk
