By Gary Eason Education editor, BBC News website

Changes are likely to mean more formal assessments

We have been here before: school coursework has had something of a chequered history since its arrival with GCSEs in the late 1980s.

It was a fundamental plank of the new General Certificate of Secondary Education that replaced O-levels and CSEs.

Sir Keith Joseph, the Conservative education secretary who introduced the GCSE in 1988, had insisted that 20% should be the minimum coursework element of the qualification.

Coursework in English accounted for between 50% and 100% of the marks.

But within a few years it came under attack from the then prime minister, John Major, and his education secretary, Kenneth Clarke.

In a speech demanding higher standards in education, Mr Major said it was the less able children who had suffered most from "the zealous adoption of fashionable theories", including "hostility to testing".

They wanted 20% to be the upper limit on the amount of marks that could be gleaned from coursework.

Impact on results

This ran into fierce resistance from the education establishment. Syllabuses that had just been submitted for approval had to be rewritten at a cost of millions of pounds.

In the end they settled on between 20% and 40%, depending on the subject.

The latest report this week from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, charting the history of the GCSE, has looked at the effect of such changes on children's results.

Its somewhat surprising finding is that there was none.

"The first results for the new specifications were issued in summer 1994. There was much concern at the time that the change could damage national results," it said.

"In reality, the proportion achieving grades A*-C rose from 57.0% in 1993 to 58.4% in 1994."

Gender gap

A feature of GCSE English then as now was that girls did far better than boys - as they do generally.

This is sometimes attributed to the idea that girls are better at coursework, with its requirement for better skills of organisation and sustained commitment, while boys thrive more under the pressure of end-of-course exams.

But the QCA notes: "For those who thought that coursework gave girls a particular advantage, it would have been a surprise that reducing the coursework weighting from 100% to 40% did nothing to narrow the performance gap.

"In fact it widened between 1993 and 1994. It remains almost as wide today."

The QCA is always concerned with the potential impact of any changes it makes - what it calls the "backwash" on teaching and learning.

But based on historical precedent, it is reasonably confident that the latest coursework adjustments, once it has finalised them, should not dramatically affect results.

Maths and English

That said, there is bound to be some anxiety in schools about their league table positions.

On the one hand, maths coursework has been axed because of widespread concerns among teachers, including the problem of "authenticating candidates' work".

If there has been any fiddling going on, maths results might be expected to dip.

But on the other hand, the new benchmark for the school "league tables" set by the government is the proportion of youngsters attaining five good GCSEs including English and maths.

Still, the other "GCSEs" can be, as now, any equivalent qualifications.

Pass mark lowered

A spectacular feature of recent years has been the boom in the numbers taking vocational GNVQs - each worth four good GCSEs in the school tables.

Those are being phased out, so schools are looking at replacements such as BTecs and OCR Nationals.

A totally new qualification to replace the most popular GNVQ - in information technology - is selling well according to the exam board that devised it, Edexcel.

This is the diploma in digital applications, or Dida.

It has emerged that, on a pilot version this summer, the pass marks on the various Dida papers had to be lowered - to just 36% overall.

Edexcel said new qualifications always took a while to bed down and the QCA had agreed to the removal of the pre-set grade boundaries "to ensure parity with GCSE and GNVQ standards".

There were rigorous quality assurance procedures.

Grade boundaries would be reviewed again in 2007 and "set at the appropriate level to ensure continued parity with the standard required".

Dida is worth the equivalent of four higher-grade GCSEs.

Assessment is entirely through coursework.