The Castle and the Gate: A Critical Response to Conrad Hughes's Changing Assessment

If we are living in the age of polycrisis, possible solutions need to be more than singular responses. Conrad Hughes's Changing Assessment arrives as both a necessary intervention and a frustratingly limited plan for action that reads more like an advertisement for his work at the International School of Geneva (Ecolint). Hughes offers a compelling moral vision for humanising assessment, yet the book fails to grapple with the structural and economic realities that perpetuate educational inequality, ultimately undermining the very dignity he seeks to preserve.

The central idea in Changing Assessment is persuasive. High-stakes standardised assessments dislocate learning from the embodied and experiential process evident at primary and preparatory levels. Hughes calls for competency-based and more holistic models, presenting Ecolint's Learner Passport as a genuinely innovative solution to the problem he identifies. It is an engaging solution, but the book suffers from five critical blind spots that render it more manifesto than strategy for addressing the polycrisis. Ultimately, it offers innovations for those already within the castle walls while leaving the gates firmly locked for the majority.

A Singular Purpose for Education

Hughes positions education as preparation for "the world" but does not outline what that might mean. What world? Whose world? This narrow view fails to engage with the plurality of purposes that schools serve. By overlooking the social, civic, democratic, and intellectual aims of education, the book falls into an instrumental view of schooling that does not address the paradox at the heart of education.

As James Baldwin articulated in "A Talk to Teachers" (1963):

The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions... To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.

Baldwin's insight reveals that schools are more than preparation for the world. Hughes captures an element of Baldwin's moral impetus but dulls it through lack of expansiveness, treating education as individual optimisation for work rather than collective transformation.

Innovation Built on Privilege

The solution Hughes proposes, the Learner Passport, derived from his own institution, depends on extraordinary privilege. Ecolint charges fees equivalent to tens of thousands of pounds per year and requires staff with expertise, time and training, as well as an organisational context not limited by national inspectorates. Working in an international fee-paying school provides opportunities simply beyond most other institutions. To suggest that something from this elite environment can be transplanted and thrive elsewhere is naïve. Rather than being replicable, it is structurally exclusive, dependent not on universal conditions but on the context of wealth.

Hughes partially recognises this dynamic, arguing in Chapter 1 that

…it is naive to think that the grading system is entirely meritocratic as, in reality, it describes social advantage as much as raw talent: the two become difficult to disentangle since those who do well on school tests tend to come from educated backgrounds in the first place (p.2).

Yet this recognition disappears in proposing the Learner Passport as a pathway to human flourishing, without addressing how its implementation requires the very privileges that exclude most students from its benefits.

Cultural Hegemony in Progressive Clothing

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the book is Hughes's use of the concept of cultural hegemony. Antonio Gramsci argued that privileged groups use culture to embed ideas and values that support their economic and political dominance through education, without reverting to overt coercion. Hughes frames this discussion through colonialism and decolonisation, noting the lack of representation in curriculum schemes and assessments (pp.30-32).

However, this acknowledgement does not extend to Hughes's own proposal of the learner passport or the conditions that gave rise to it. This is essentially what Gramsci would recognise as hegemonic consolidation: the use of progressive language masking the extension of existing privileged interests. By focusing on preparation for "the world of work" rather than community resistance, resilience and democratic participation, Hughes's reforms risk repackaging elite educational values as universal solutions.

Market Structures and Assessment Economies Ignored

This inattentiveness is also present in the silence around the economics of assessment itself. Examination boards like Pearson or the IB are not neutral institutions but multinational corporations seeking increased revenues and market expansion. They profit from the high-stakes environments Hughes criticises and will happily expand into competency-based markets too. Advocating for changing assessment without confronting these commercial interests reveals a misunderstanding of why current systems persist. To give one example: even if Hughes's reforms gained traction, what prevents these same corporations from co-opting "holistic assessment" as their next product line, complete with training programmes, digital platforms, and certification schemes? The ability for AI to help "capture" learning through facial and speech recognition through constant monitoring is growing, and with it, new market opportunities to reduce the embodied educational experience to a metric that can be counted, weighed, and measured.

Historical and Comparative Blind Spots

Hughes positions current assessment problems as products of 19th and 20th-century reforms, which is surprising given that ranking humans predates these periods considerably. Whether Plato's Republic with its citizens of bronze, silver and gold, or medieval distinctions between believers and unbelievers, hierarchical categorisation is hardly a modern invention. The contemporary form may use different markers, but the underlying logic is longstanding. More significantly, Hughes overlooks alternative models that could inform his analysis. His discussion of universities perpetuating high-stakes systems through entry criteria mentions no consideration of alternatives like Argentina's open-access higher education system, where entry is universal but attrition rates are high and degrees take longer to complete. Even if high-stakes assessment is removed from schools, the problem shifts elsewhere and transforms what schooling looks like in the upper years. The Netherlands also presents an interesting hybrid example in that high school students complete school designed assessments which can include different types of assessment items and national exams. Hughes's international experience could have usefully engaged with such models.

A Vision for the Few

I certainly admire Hughes as an educator, and his book is a well-intentioned attempt at reforming high-stakes assessment systems that are indeed dehumanising and counter to human flourishing. What is useful is that Hughes conveys the toll of testing on young people. Anyone working with students in the upper years will recognise the anxiety and damage that arise when catastrophising and suicidal ideation become the cultural norm around examinations.

Changing Assessment succeeds as a text that raises consciousness around these issues and offers a vision of what education could become, but it is frustratingly silent about the structures and forces preventing that transformation. If you hope to change a system, there is a need to apprehend it fully and find genuine leverage points.

In our historical conjuncture, the existing polycrisis needs more than humane alternatives that can only reasonably be applied to the privileged few. Hughes points toward more inclusive assessment, but truly inclusive education demands more inclusive power over educational decisions. The question is not just how to design better assessments, but who gets to design them and for what ends. Until we address these deeper questions and realise that schools have multiple purposes, any progressive reform risks becoming another sophisticated form of exclusion, one that claims to transcend inequality through humanistic rhetoric while remaining a vision for the few, not the many.