The Government is firmly committed to increasing the amount of information available to the public, particularly in the world of education where data on the performance of schools, colleges and young people has long been the subject of fierce debate.

Michael Gove’s E-Bacc has already created a new league table of its own, with schools up and down the country now trying to work out where they stand against this new measurement. And we are also heading up to August when, whatever the results are, the press and others will argue that either courses have become so easy that they’re not worth the paper they’re written on, or that schools are not as good as they used to be.

But behind the sensationalist tabloid headlines, there is a genuine debate to be had about the nature of our exam and qualification system and the need for quality in the education system. The recently-published Wolf Review argues that English and Maths GCSEs are the cornerstones of a young person’s education. However, making students continue to sit an exam that they did not pass the first time round may not be the best way of getting them to a basic level of numeracy and literacy.

The collection and analysis of information on schools, colleges and student performance will be critical. Once young people hit post-16 education the range of information currently available is somewhat limited. Do we know how many young people resit GCSEs?  What’s the level of pass rate? Where do they go? Or which sixth form colleges, further education colleges or school sixth forms provide the best pass rates in the world of resits?

Our own small-scale research suggests that for those students who failed GCSE Maths first time around, the chances of getting a pass at resit are very very slim – less than 5%. We don’t know whether this is the case nationally and more analysis would be needed to understand what is working well and what is not. What we do know is that the information on the number and level of GCSE resits is scarce and fragmented.

We also need to know more about the impact of resits on other areas of study. If you’re resitting GCSE English and Maths, does this damage your chances of getting good grades in other subjects? Does it undermine your ability to get a good BTEC or A-levels, or even a degree? What’s the relationship between achieving ‘good’ GCSE results in English and Maths and going onto further study? To what extent are English and Maths a pre-requisite for both the world of work and further study? And fundamentally, is achieving a GCSE grade C an accurate measure of literacy and numeracy? Are we teaching young people to have a desire for learning or are we giving them the skills to get employed? Can we do both?

As we approach a world where young people will need to stay in education or training until they are18, we need to decide what it is that we want for them. Targets that are measured against a bar, which is already set too high, may have the effect of setting them up to fail – hardly the best start to adulthood!