ABSTRACT
The General Certificate of Secondary Education was introduced after many years of discussion about the nature and purpose of secondary education in this country. It had been argued that with an increasing number of young people continuing their education after the age of sixteen the traditional examinations no longer merited such an important place in the education system. While this may not have been the case there was wide agreement that the nature of the skills which could be tested by traditional examinations was restricted and did not properly reflect the actual learning outcomes of the courses. It was also argued that many of the skills which were not adequately tested by such a system were those skills considered to be of particular value after the individual had completed that part of their formal education.
