Wasteful, costly and cruel: it’s time to bin GCSEs for good | Simon Jenkins

The pandemic gave us the chance to rethink our education system, so why do we persist with this pointless ritual?

Two years ago, I prayed that the government might make permanent the cancelling of GCSE exams because of Covid. This wasteful, costly, cruel and pointless ritual of teenage evaluation could at last be binned; schools could revert from being testing machines to actually educating children.

No such luck. This week, thousands of young people will start their “mocks”, driving through to ex...