Does it make sense to introduce a standardised entrance testing procedure for international pupils coming to study at UK boarding schools?

I wonder what your thoughts would be if you were an international parent, looking to spend an eye watering £180,000 in school fees in the next five years so your child can come to the UK to study from Year 9 to Year 13?

Consider this scenario, your consultant advises you that ‘best practice’ is to apply to three schools to ensure you have multiple offers to consider. You pay the three application fees and complete the three application forms and then you are told your child will need to sit tests for each school, and there will be three for each school – nine in total.

Your child is already tired from school work and you have to schedule in nine tests that may, due to ongoing Covid restrictions, have to be organised remotely. You may have to liaise with a remote invigilator to sit in on all the calls and you may decide to split the tests between days, so your child is not sitting all three tests for each school on the same day, as they will take over three hours to complete.

So, you arrange five different sittings for the exams over five separate days, over 10 hours of testing in total. You sit back and wonder isn’t there a better way of doing this?

As an independent consultant that advises families on school placements, this is is probably the conversation we dread the most: explaining the school testing procedure to international families. Of course, most grin and bear it, but is it a great example of ‘putting the customer first’…?

Pat Moores, Director of UK Education Guide.
Many have tried and failed to introduce a generic testing procedure and, of course, the Common Entrance exam is suitable for domestic pupils, but has no EAL aspect, so was always unsuitable for international pupils.

However, isn’t it time to look at this again? In this incredibly testing climate, shouldn’t we be doing everything to make sure the UK is as welcoming an environment for international pupils as it possibly can be? As Caroline Nixon , Director of BAISIS (British Association of Independent Schools with International Students) acknowledges: “Anything that breaks down barriers between potential pupils and schools is welcome. And the burden of testing certainly is one of those barriers. However, schools rightly want to be sure that there is a good fit between the child and their school as otherwise an unhappy experience for all could be the outcome. There is a conflict between these two aims which as yet remains to be resolved. “

Not everyone agrees that generic testing is the way to go. Gareth Collier , Principal at Cardiff Sixth Form College, sees things very differently:

“The problem with a generic test is in the name. If it is generic, then it would provide only a relatively basic set of data about a pupil/student and insufficient specificity with regard for suitability for study, particularly at the highest level of learning in a UK school.

Generic tests, by nature, need to be accessible to a wide range of student abilities. The range and style of questioning must be broad in order to be appropriate for every pupil/student and the amount of valuable data is therefore reduced, making selection for a chosen school or course much more of a lottery than when tests designed specifically for the chosen course or school are used.”

Of course Gareth is right that something will be lost with a generic test. However, the generic testing procedure would still need to be split by age group to make it more meaningful and cater for a spread of abilities, as current public examinations already do.

Gareth also highlights rightly that there is now the offer of ‘indicator tests’ that are available to parents to buy and for schools to offer to give an indication of the ability of the child and whether they are a suitable academic ‘fit’ for a particular school. There is significant value to parents in this approach but, from the child’s perspective, as no one it seems is suggesting these tests replace school specific testing, isn’t this just ultimately more testing?

On the other side of the discussion, Mike Oliver from Brooke House College sees significant value in a generic testing procedure and points out that the “gold standard” of IELTS testing for assessing English language (written, verbal and verbal reasoning) capabilities already exists.

“IELTS is a known standard and it can be related to across a wide range of UK boarding schools; I regard that form of common entrance requirement as a good thing. If a pupil arrives with an IELTS score of 6.5, everyone knows what that means in terms of English language ability and what then might be expected of the pupil with such a score and possible future outcomes at A-level, for instance.”

Also, he points out that for 6th form entry, in many cases, success in IGCSE’s/GCSE’s is recognised by almost all schools as a cast-iron indicator of ability and yet these are ultimately generic tests, with different levels of success built in. If this is possible at GCSE level why isn’t it possible at Year 9 level?

Certainly schools like to have their own tests and think they are unique to them, but almost all schools test the same things in the three tests they offer: English, maths and verbal reasoning. Therefore, it is hard to argue that the tests will be very different in content.

IELTS is a generic English test accepted globally already, so there is already an internationally recognised test for English that exists and at higher education level is one the most commonly accepted for UK university entry and UKVI visa purposes. How hard therefore would it be to develop generic, age-appropriate tests for maths and verbal reasoning?

The tests could and should be developed to be secure and success levels (as at GCSE) should be built into the tests, so if a school is highly selective then the benchmark for entry would be 7 or 8 for example, whereas for a less selective school it could be 4 or 5. Results from the same test would only be shared with the relevant schools and from a data protection point of view no school would know which other schools were receiving the same results.

It is also vitally important the tests are developed by a highly reputable organisation that is independent. However, the real test is whether schools are willing to relinquish their ‘unique’ tests? Back again to ‘putting the customer first’, I would suggest.

It is also arguable that as new players enter the market that are looking to automate the application process, they will drive forward this approach and so perhaps it would be better for schools to ‘own’ this development now and embrace this wonderful opportunity to enhance customer service to their international applicants and their families?

Article published here by Study Travel magazine

https://studytravel.network/magazine/news/2/28008

Pat Moores is the Director of UK Education Guide, an independent resource on UK secondary schools options for UK and international families.