Enactment Over Enrolment: Where Resit Policy Is Really Decided

In November 2025, in schools and colleges across England, well over 160,000 GCSE English and Maths entries were sat in the autumn series, a figure up almost six per cent on the year before, and almost all of them post-16 students resitting to improve on their summer exam performance. The November window exists for a sensible reason, to offer an early second chance to those genuinely ready to take it. It is a flexibility built into national policy with good intentions. And it is, in places, being gamed.

The Francis review’s interim report in March 2025 named the practice directly – students entered before they are ready, on the off-chance an early attempt lands. But it would be too easy and wholly unfair to read this as colleges behaving cynically. In my experience the motivation does not start in the institution. Rather, this is a symptom of the accountability regime that surrounds it, and the pressure on colleges to demonstrate positive outcomes, on a timetable, for cohorts who arrive demotivated and behind their peers. When faced with that pressure, colleges entering a borderline student early could be argued to be a rational response to where the system places its incentives. A flexibility in policy meant to serve the learner is twisted, by the accountability around it, into serving the measure. It is Gert Biesta’s incisive question in practice – are we measuring what we value, or valuing what we measure?

Are we measuring what we value, or valuing what we measure?

This is the deeper pattern, and it is the one the reform debate keeps stepping past. Arguments continue endlessly about what the policy should be – the qualification, the grade, the structure. Policy change of some kind is inevitable. The harder and far less examined question is how policy is enacted, and how a well-meant design is interpreted, negotiated and translated by real people working under real pressures, often into something its authors never intended. Stephen Ball and his colleagues, writing on how schools actually do policy, drew this distinction when noting that policies are not simply implemented, but enacted. Reform is not the document it is written on. It is what happens when carefully crafted policy changes meet the stark realities of the lived experiences of teachers and students. 

Level 1 “Preparation for GCSE” qualification

This brings us to the proposed level 1 “Preparation for GCSE” qualification, out for consultation until early June with the government’s response expected later this year. The aim is to give learners who left school with a grade 2 or below a structured year to build foundations before they resit, potentially with modular assessment so they can, in the consultation’s words, “bank progress” and rebuild confidence. But a new structure does not enter a vacuum. It enters the same accountability field, and will be enacted by the same people under the same pressures. 

So the more useful question is not what the qualification should be, but what becomes of it once it leaves the page. The accountability field will not shift quickly, and no institution can opt out of it; the sector can spend the year arguing about structure, as it always does, or turn to where the policy is actually realised, in the hands it passes through. 

This is the part the structural debate tends to miss. Enactment is distributed across everyone the policy touches. The policymaker can design with enactment in mind or ignore it. The leader can set the conditions, and the teacher exercises the judgement on which all of it finally rests. The FE Commissioner’s own effective-practice guide for 16 to 19 English and maths, published in February 2026, is at root a document about exactly this, inviting us to ask where and in our own settings, the gap between the policy as written and the policy as lived opens up. 

Planning Season

That is a live question, not a future one. As the summer approaches and planning for next year begins, the resit cycle will turn again regardless of what the consultation decides; the cohort that sat those 160,000 November entries will be followed by another. It would be presumptuous to set out what good enactment looks like in every college. The whole point is that it is local, judged in context, and that those closest to the learners are the ones positioned to recognise it. But the question is worth carrying into the planning season by anyone with a stake in it is not “what will the new qualification be?”, but “what, in our setting, with these learners, would it take for the policy to be lived as it was intended?”

There are two horizons to hold at once. The closer is this forthcoming year. These students cannot wait for a reform to arrive. The further is the reform itself, and here the stepping-stone qualification is a genuine opportunity if approached as a question of enactment from the outset rather than of structure alone. A qualification designed with an eye to how it will actually be lived, with the conditions and incentives it will meet, stands a better chance of becoming what it intends than one that trusts its specification to carry it. 

None of this is an argument against reform. It is a reminder that the worth of a reform is decided less in its drafting than in its doing, and that the doing is already underway, in every classroom and planning meeting, while the consultation runs its course. A grade, in the end, is not produced by a qualification, but by a person. Whatever structure surrounds that individual has always been the question that matters most.

By Dr Michael Smith is a specialist in educational assessment, an academic researcher and co-founder of Markus. He has worked in further education for over 17 years, most recently as Vice Principal at a London College.