Results day is always a day of great anticipation, the media rolls out the same slightly irritating headlines and we all carry on year after year doing what we can to ensure students achieve their qualifications in spite of all the barriers we might face.
This year was extraordinary in terms of teacher pressure to ensure we taught a modified specification, moderated it and assessed it! Open Drama UK invites you to now take some time, post results to review the data around the 2020 cohort and the positive news there is about the volume of young people who are accessing Drama at KS4 – despite what we might be told from horror headlines!
Back in February 2021, Carl, our Dorset Champion, asked whether we had any data on the percentage of schools that offer GCSE Drama. We didn’t, but it was a question that piqued my interest, so I set about finding an answer.
The question of how many schools offer GCSE Drama is one I believed we wouldn’t be able to answer. From my time working at an exam board, I knew there was nowhere that this data would be stored centrally. The only way to answer this would be to ask every school in the country. As an organisation led and run by volunteers, we did not have the resources to do that. So, I set about redefining a question that we could answer.
There are a few key terms it is worth defining here as well, as I have used them to be specific in the data I have sourced.
- School – I have used this term in its widest sense. Any registered establishment which provides education to young people.
- Centre – The exam board term for a school which enters students for a qualification. This includes all types of school including state and independent schools.
- Candidate – A student who has been entered for a qualification.
- Cohort – A year group in a school.
- Level 2 qualification – Any qualification which is designed to be at the level most students will complete at age 16. This includes GCSEs and vocational qualifications, such as BTECs.
- Performance measures – A series of data points which are used to create school league tables by the DfE. https://www.gov.uk/school-performance-tables (2020 and 2021 Performance table data is not available due to the impact of COVID 19 on assessments)
When deciding on a question, I felt that two questions would be better. These became:
- What proportion of centres entered candidates for GCSE Drama in England in the summer 2020 series?
- What proportion of centres entered candidates for Level 1/2 Drama/Performing Arts qualifications in England in the summer 2020 series?
To answer these questions, I needed to find out the total number of centres in England and how many centres had made entries. I chose 2020 as this was the most recent exam series that there would be data available for. Whilst there were no exams in this year due to COVID, the students would have chosen GCSE Drama or an equivalent qualification before the pandemic hit and would have still been entered for exams in the series.
How many schools were there in England with a Year 11 cohort completing qualifications in 2020?
This is a simple and complicated question. The simple answer is 4289.
The Department for Education publishes data based on the census completed by every school each year, this usually happens in October – just so you know! This is called Schools, Pupils, and their characteristics data. I used the School Level Underlying Data spreadsheet to find this number. This includes every school who had one or more student in year 11 in the 2020 census.
This is where the question becomes complicated. Would a school with only 1 or 2 Year 11s offer GCSE Drama? How many would there need to be for GCSE Drama to become a feasible option for a school to offer? Here is where I started to make some assumptions. I decided that 10 would be a good starting point to answer the questions. Every school who has less than 10 students in their year 11 cohort are designated as a PRU (pupil referral unit) or Special School. Whilst these schools do offer Drama qualifications, I felt that, on balance, if the cohort is smaller than 10 it would be less likely that they would, compared to a larger mainstream school.
The complicated answer is therefore 3921 schools. I will call this the number of ‘typical’ schools when calculating the answer to the questions.
How many schools in England entered candidates for a drama qualification in summer 2020?
The number of candidates entering a qualification is published each year, however the number of centres is not publicly available data. Cue messages to the exam boards. I want to say a big thank you to all the exam boards I contacted as they all provided me with the data, I needed to answer this question. When I approach the boards, I did say that if they provided the data, we would not publish the number of centres for each individual board as that was not necessary for me to be able to answer the question.
I decided to gather data for the three main qualifications offered by exam boards. These were:
- GCSE Drama (AQA, Eduqas, OCR, Pearson)
- iGCSE Drama (A* – G and 9-1 specifications – Cambridge Assessment International Education)
- Level 1/2 Tech Award (AQA, Pearson, RSL)
I have included the data for iGCSE Drama within the GCSE Drama data as these qualifications are similar, however the iGCSE is mainly taught in independent schools as it is not included on the performance tables qualifications list meaning less state schools offer it. Leaving this out of the GCSE category skewed the data in a way that was not representative of what was offered in schools.
The number of schools offering GCSE Drama was approximately 2840. The data provided included a small number of international centres, but it was not possible to separate this out to provide an exact number which is why this number is approximate. The number of schools offering Level 1/2 vocational qualifications was 1610.
What proportion of centres entered candidates for GCSE Drama or Level 1/2 Drama/Performing Arts in England in the summer 2020 series?
There are lots of valid answers to these questions, but I feel that the answers below do give Drama teachers hope. We have all heard teachers experiencing drama being cut from the curriculum, but this data suggests that this is not widespread. There is data which shows that candidate entry numbers in arts subjects is falling nationally, which is also a likely factor in these experiences.
66% of all schools offer GCSE Drama
72% of typical* schools offer GCSE Drama
*Remember there are 3921 ‘typical’ schools.
This number may seem low; however, I believe this may reflect the changes to the GCSE which introduced a compulsory written exam in the 2016 first teaching specifications. A significant movement away from GCSE towards vocational qualification happened when the new specifications were introduced as teachers felt these qualifications were better suited to their students and the nature of the subject.
GCSE Drama should not be seen as the only qualification that is important here. The Level 1/2 Tech Award is an excellent qualification and is equivalent to GCSE. It is different in its assessment, but not in its standards. The complication with answering our second question is that some schools offer both the GCSE and the Tech Award. From the data, I cannot determine how many centres this applies to. So, I ran a poll on social media to get a sense of what percentage may offer both and applied this to the data. The poll showed that 27.5% offered both GCSE Drama and the Tech Award in Performing Arts. Applying this to the Vocational qualification entry total meant that the total number of centres offering GCSE Drama, or the Tech Award, (excluding the centres that may offer both) from the vocational data was approximately 4007.
Therefore:
Approximately 93% of all schools offer Level 1/2 Performing Arts and Drama qualifications
Approximately 100% of typical schools offer Level 1/2 Performing Arts and Drama qualifications
This gives us hope that the reports of schools cutting Drama are in a very small minority, and I hope that this reassures teachers that there is a lot of access to Drama qualifications for our young people across England.
We are doing a great job at offering access to Drama to our students, keep up the good work!