This week I've been speaking to school leaders and teachers at the Education Show in Birmingham about the opportunity we have to reform GCSEs.
I always welcome the chance to talk through issues and to hear from school leaders and teachers about how things work for them, in schools. It was good to talk about the big questions that need to be thought through, so that new GCSEs are the best they can be.
I want new GCSEs to be worthwhile to study, stimulating to teach and to command the respect of any Government and the public.
GCSEs have been core qualifications in schools for almost three decades. I was saying in Birmingham that we have a real opportunity to develop GCSEs that will, I hope, be fit for the next decade. Some qualifications quite rightly have shorter life spans, but GCSEs are central to secondary education and they need to be stable for a sensible length of time.
They need to be designed so that the subject content can be tweaked and kept up to date with technological and other developments on a subject by subject basis. Good, well thought through qualifications are able to accommodate that sort of tweaking and they should stand the test of time.
You can read my speech to the Birmingham education show here.
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Glenys Stacey
Chief Regulator