Education Secretary Michael Gove announced on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show on Sunday that modular GCSEs are to be phased out from September 2012.

Mr Gove said, "We have to look at what's happening to exams and to curricula across the globe.One of the things that's happened, unfortunately, over the last 10 years is that other countries have had more rigorous exams, they have had curricula more relevant to the 21st century and we've got to catch up.”

"In the last few weeks we have seen the exam boards make a number of mistakes which I think are heartbreaking for the students who are sitting exams and who are given the wrong questions or the wrong facts. So we need change.”

"One particular change which we are going to implement this week, which will start in 2012, is we are going to change the way GCSEs operate. The problem that we had is that instead of sitting every part of a GCSE at the end of a course, bits of it were taken along the way,"

Mr Gove said, "Those bits could be resat. That meant instead of concentrating on teaching and learning you had people who were being trained again and again to clear the hurdle of the examination along the way.”

"That meant that unfortunately less time was being spent developing a deep and rounded knowledge of the subject.” He added: "I think it's a mistake and I think the culture of resits is wrong. I think that what we need to do is make sure, certainly at GCSE, that you have a clear two-year run."

He outlined exam watchdog Ofqual’s recommendations that the individual modules should now be sat together, "It won't start in September of this year because obviously we don't want to disrupt things in mid-flow. But from September 2012 all new courses will be taught in a way which means all the modules will be taken at the end."

The Department for Education has issued a statement, “This [modular] system was introduced in 2009 and this Government believes it has:

 

• made GCSE study a constant churn of modular exams and frequent resits,
• encouraged some schools to enter children early for exams, especially maths, against their interests, and
• damaged teaching and has meant more and more time has been lost to resits.

 

“Those starting GCSEs in September 2012 will not do any exams in summer 2013 but will do all their exams at the end of the two year course in summer 2014, as used to happen. This will help deal with the problem of resits and will give schools time to teach subjects properly. After the new National Curriculum for English, Maths and Science is introduced in September 2013, new GCSEs will be designed that will not be modular - modularisation will end for GCSEs.”

iGCSEs, which have recently been approved for state schools and were initially developed for international schools, have already moved away from the modular system. These examinations have been seen for some time as a more rigorous and flexible option than their traditional counterpart the GCSE.

GCSEs are taken by most state school pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.