Education and examination: the other side of the coin

The idea that we sacrifice education to high-stakes examining has a long pedigree. If only we could separate education from examination, then teachers could teach the right things in the right way and students could learn for the love of learning itself. Rather than education being sacrificed to examinations, an analysis of the emergence of a national system of examining in England reveals how they were its salvation. This analysis is used to unpick the policy logic of curriculum-based examining in England, situated within two principal functions of schooling: the educative function, which is to educate; and the distributive function, which is to distribute desirable occupational pathway progression opportunities. According to this analysis, education and certification are two sides of the same coin. The paper concludes that certification will always impact education – both positively and negatively – and the holy grail is therefore to find the optimal trade-off.