Too many exams, too many pupils let down: Whitehall plans reset of GCSEs

Rachel Sylvester

Political Editor

Too many exams, too many pupils let down: Whitehall plans reset of GCSEs

Strategy to help failing white working-class boys will be included in plans to rethink policy on exams and training. But how far will leaders be prepared to go?

The actor Eddie Marsan is an avid reader who studies complex texts to learn his lines. But when he was growing up on an east London council estate, the first time he picked up a book for pleasure, his father grabbed it and threw it across the room.

“The things that held me back were cultural,” he says. “In my experience, for the white working class, because they’d experienced poverty over generations, everything was short term – economically, educationally, morally.”