The Smith Report

On April 9th _{2014 Michael Gove wrote to Professor Mark E. Smith, of Lancaster University to}

thank him for his “stewardship” of the ‘Consultation on revised A level subject content’, and the report that Prof. Smith had submitted to the Secretary of State in the previous month. The recommendations within the report were shared with Ofqual by the Secretary of State, who agreed to adopt them for the A levels due to be taught from September 2015 (Gove, 2014).

The report was the culmination of a process that had begun a year before when Professor Smith, then Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster University, was asked by the Department for Education to chair a review of the A level content in “key subjects” (Department for Education, 2013b). Professor Smith was previously the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice- Chancellor for Research, Chair of the Faculty of Science, and Professor of Physics at Warwick University (n.d.). In addition to these roles he was, at the time, a member of several HE research and career-related boards and a member of the Council of Trustees of the exam board AQA (n.d.). He was, therefore in a position to act as a bridge between school, FE and HEI communities.

During the consultation Professor Smith examined thirteen A level subjects that included all of the Russell Group’s ‘Facilitating Subjects’ (with the exception of modern and classical languages): biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, sociology, history, art and design, business studies, economics, English, computing and geography. The aim of the consultation was to examine “What changes to subject criteria (content and skills) were thought necessary by stakeholders, (especially, but not exclusively HE)” and “The likelihood

of being in a position to offer a new A level by 2015 in each subject.” (Smith, Independent Chair’s report on the review of current GCE ‘specification content’ within subject criteria - A report to Ofqual, 2013, p. 3)

While the wording of the first aim tacitly assumes that changes were necessary, the

processes designed were to determine the extent of them and involved three main stages:

• Initial reviews, involving responses from teachers, higher education and learned societies

• Scrutiny meetings, involving exam board subject specialists • Final review meetings, led by the Independent Chair

Figure 10: Diagrammatic representation of the Smith Report’s review process (ibid, p. 4)

Notable here is a slight omission in the description of the initial reviews between the brief description of the stages and that shown in the figure. The review group, stated to engage teachers, HEIs and learned societies did not do so directly, nor did it ever intend to. Instead it was exam boards that were asked to carry out this step, and report the extent to which they had done so.

Smith reports that all of the exam boards “had extensively consulted to obtain good evidence from higher education” and that they had all gone beyond their already existing HE advisory boards (ibid, Section 1.3). However, this engagement is not without query and criticism from the organisations that are purported to have been consulted, as we will

subsequently see. Additionally noted in Smith’s introduction are his expectations of the reform process:

“The concerns that brought about this review were mostly about the extent to which A levels prepare students well for HE, so stakeholders were asked what changes were necessary for 2015 to make A levels more suitable for entry into HE. The review has attempted to address these concerns, looking for ways of adapting the ‘specification content’ of the criteria to allow a smooth progression from A level to degree course. However, the review has also considered the broader purposes of A levels, such as the value of the A levels to business/employers.”

(Smith, Independent Chair’s report on the review of current GCE ‘specification content’ within subject criteria - A report to Ofqual, 2013, p. 5)

Here the reform makes references to ‘changes’, ‘more suitable’ and ‘adapting’; all terms that suggest that discussions with exam boards are based around modifications to what they already do; rather than starting from scratch and following Ofqual’s suggestions to be innovative, they instead place the reforms as making guided alterations. Also of significance is that Smith designates the decisions over what being ‘more suitable’ means to

stakeholders, yet the process of engaging with these stakeholders is, again, carried out by the exam boards.

While the exam boards had a significant amount of power in this process, it is through the scrutiny meetings that this was supposedly checked. The make-up of these meetings was separate to each individual subject, but included “the Independent Chair, the Senior Responsible Officer for each of the four exam boards and normally two other

representatives from each of the exam boards, a subject specialist and a further senior person with responsibility in the subject area” (Smith, Independent Chair’s report on the review of current GCE ‘specification content’ within subject criteria - A report to Ofqual, 2013, p. 5). As with Ofqual, there is no record of who these people were in the report, nor what credentials were used when engaging specialists or those with experience. At this stage exam boards are reporting to a group of three people the views and thoughts that

each has independently sought and then shared with each other, and the final decision “records the Independent Chair’s findings after scrutiny and challenge by him and the four Responsible Officers at the final subject review meetings” (ibid). The second “and” is

significant here, suggesting that the decision is made in collaboration with the exam boards, and collaboration that produces subject content that they will then interpret to produce qualifications. The likelihood of bias and self-serving potential of this are considerable, but the involvement of the exam boards is also curious given how A level reforms were

instigated following an exam board scandal and questions over their ethics in 2011.

For each subject that is reviewed a list of organisations involved and engaged by the exam boards is produced, however the report notes that because of the short timescale of the reform process “not all interested parties felt able to take the opportunity to feed into this review” (ibid, p. 7). This is a significant deviation from the wishes of the Department for Education and Ofqual and, although Smith notes that both organisations have

acknowledged the time constraints “to compensate for this, the exam boards were able to cite recent input through other mechanisms available to them on an on-going basis” (ibid, p. 7). These other mechanisms were often reports from learned societies and prior review meetings held with the exam boards and universities, but dilute the original intentions of the Department for Education to involve these groups in reforming the qualification.

The scrutiny committees would ultimately grade a subject as to whether it required change, required minor change, or required significant change, “to allow change to linear form and allow progression to HE” (ibid, p. 6). These were later expanded to “tidying up”, “minor but substantive change”, and “major substantive change” respectively, but it is the terminology that again signifies that Smith has interpreted the reform process to be purely based on moving examinations into a linear format (rather than modular) and that HEIs should support the qualification. Given the HE sector signalled their support for many of the

current A level qualifications in Ofqual’s 2012 study ‘Fit for Purpose?’ (Ofqual & Ipsos MORI, 2012) then the extent to which exam boards may consider changing their qualifications to satisfy the Smith criteria is potentially minimal.

Considering briefly what would happen if a subject were considered to require major changes, it was suggested that the work to develop that subject would pass to the A level Content Advisory Board (ALCAB), comprising members of the Russell Group. They would supposedly work on these qualifications, but would also have a role for all subjects in “an annual review to determine whether or not they need to change in the light of

developments in the subject area and as the effects of the changes proposed here work through to students progressing to HE” (Smith, Independent Chair’s report on the review of current GCE ‘specification content’ within subject criteria - A report to Ofqual, 2013, p. 6). Subsequently, ALCAB were closed down in January 2015 by the Department for Education, ten months following the formal acceptance of this report’s findings, nine months before any of the reformed qualifications were taught, and after carrying out no annual reviews.

To consider the how HEIs and learned institutions responded during the subject content reform it is useful to again examine one subject in detail, specifically the Smith report’s scrutiny of Physics, and how this was responded to.