During the course of interviews at Windhover, it became apparent that the school’s students, and many others in the private sector, did not sit the same English examinations at the age of 16 as state school pupils. Rather than sitting GCSEs in English Language and Literature, they sat an International GCSE (IGCSE). Designed by awarding bodies for use in overseas schools following an English medium curriculum, the IGCSE was similar to the GCSE, but with a few specific differences. These made it attractive to private school teachers, looking to offer something with more challenge, variety and creativity to their students. Unlike state schools, private schools could enter students for the IGCSE because
96 they were not obliged to be measured against other institutions in national league tables. Alan (W40) explained that the IGCSE was one way that teachers at Windhover made sure that exams did not stifle creativity. He cited as an example “an empathy answer” that students wrote in response to a drama text. He said that while such work had in the past been seen as “the poor relation of analytical and discursive writing … it is well worth doing and not just something you do if you are in the bottom set”. Bill (W6) praised the IGCSE for encouraging the kind of “independent thinking” that he linked to creativity. He mentioned an unseen part of the paper, in which
they can’t just pre-rehearse ideas about Lord of the Flies, or what have you. 25 per cent of their grade comes from how they tackle a poem or a piece of prose that they’ve never seen before, so they need to have that resilience and that willingness to form their own ideas because they will never have read it before.
Once again, creativity is constructed as part of a process of demonstrating relational differences. Matt (W20) suggested this formed part of the decision-making behind switching to IGCSE. Asked about whether examinations could limit creativity, he noted that this “is a very important point” and “one of the main reasons why in our school we switched from GCSE to IGCSE” because “in IGCSE we do put a strong emphasis in literary response to what we would call personal response”. Not only, then, was the IGCSE a means for the private school to differentiate itself from other schools, but it was also a means by which its pupils could engage in the exploration of individual agency through “personal response”. This would seem to be an examination that encouraged the process of ‘becoming’ in young people.
97 Neil (W25) acknowledged that Windhover, in following the IGCSE, was becoming more detached from state schools, and also that the decision to follow this syllabus was, at least in part, because of the opportunities for creativity it afforded – or that GCSEs did not afford. He explained that the IGCSE “has suddenly blossomed” among private schools “because of the huge dissatisfaction with the latest changes to GCSE” and that this was “partly because the breaking down of tasks and the nature of controlled assessment seemed to be running away from creativity”. In his construction, then, there would seem to be a denial of creativity to state school pupils in relation to their private school counterparts, one that had been formalised by examination structures. Neil referred to the IGCSE as “the international”, suggesting that independent schools operated on a global rather than national basis. While the state school curriculum contracted inwards to a narrow band of core texts, in the private sector it reached out across the globe. This resonated with Windhover’s claims on its website that it wanted students to develop their personality and character so that they could take up leading roles in the world. Neil constructed the greater flexibility and creativity offered by the IGCSE as metaphorically allowing Windhover students to travel further than others: “Because our GCSE syllabus is a little bit more open, it’s much simpler and more straightforward and, therefore, there are many more roads to roam”.
The growing popularity of the IGCSE with private schools led state schools to seek permission also to take the exam, and for it to count in league table measurements. Ofqual, the government agency that regulates assessment in England, worked with awarding bodies to come up with a separate version for use in the state sector. Commenting on this process, Neil stated that “there is an English version, which is a bit more constrained but not as constrained as what the home-grown exam boards tend to do”; meanwhile Windhover and other private schools “do the full international version”. Forms of assessment, it seems, and the relative levels of creativity they offer, were not distributed evenly across the school
98 system. This was also brought to light by Edie (A10) when discussing the private school that she attended as a child and later taught in for one year. She explained that this school had recently opted out of both GCSEs and IGCSEs for English Literature. Instead, it had developed its own Literature exam, which was approved by QCDA (a regulatory authority for examinations and qualifications that was abolished by the Coalition government in 2010), so that it carried equal weighting to GCSEs when students applied for university. Part of this decision was based around a desire to provide a more creative curriculum13.