Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone # and a Better Way to Think about S Chool

Exams, grades, league tables, Ofsted reports. All of them miss the point of school and together they are undermining our whole approach to education.

’An essential read - as entertaining as it is insightful - for anyone who cares about the way we treat young people’ Observer

What is school for? Drawing on his twenty years as a teacher, hundreds of interviews and his experience on the UK Government’s Social Mobility Commission, head teacher Sammy Wright exposes the fundamental misconception at the heart of our education system. By focusing on the grades pupils get in neatly siloed, academic subjects, we end up ranking them and our schools into winners and losers: some pupils are set on a trajectory to university - the rest are left ill-equipped for the world they actually face.

Wright’s entertaining and hugely important book shows that schools are - and should be - so much more than this. With wisdom and humour, balancing idealism and pragmatism, he sets out what a better way would look like and how we might get there.

’Brilliantly illuminates the realities and blindspots of the system’ Jeffrey Boakye

’Deeply absorbing...Wright deserves the highest marks’Financial Times

’Such a compelling read, no matter your outlook’Telegraph

’Extraordinary and brilliant . . . the book education has been waiting for’ Laura McInerney, co-founder of Teacher Tapp

Sammy Wright is Head of School at a large secondary in Sunderland. He sat on the government’s Social Mobility Commission from 2018-21, becoming a key voice in the debates over exam grades during the pandemic. He has taught for twenty years at schools in Oxfordshire, London and the North East. His debut novel Fit won the Northern Book Prize.