"I Did My GCSE Maths at 42 — In the Same Exam Hall as My Son"

Watch the webinar: No Exams, No Problem? How Schools Are Protecting Outcomes Without Formal Assessment

There's a moment in this webinar that stops the conversation cold. Inclusion specialist Louise Dawson, fifteen years working across UAE schools and with families navigating exam anxiety, tells the panel about sitting her GCSE Maths exam at 42, in the same hall and on the same day as her own son. She'd been a fully qualified teacher for years. She just hadn't passed that one test at 16.

"I am not a failure because I kept going," she tells the panel. It's one of several moments in this conversation that reframes what assessment is actually for and who it's really serving.

What this conversation is really about

This webinar was recorded against the backdrop of real disruption: across the UAE and the wider Middle East, formal exam sessions have been cancelled, delayed, or replaced at short notice — leaving schools, students and parents scrambling to adapt. But rather than treating that disruption purely as a crisis to survive, this panel treats it as something else: a genuine opportunity to ask what assessment should look like.

Tracy Moxley chairs a conversation with three school leaders and an inclusion specialist who between them have worked across UAE, UK, Japan, the Netherlands and Oman — and who hold genuinely different views. Andrew Spencer describes the "triangulation" approach his school built almost overnight when formal exams were pulled. David Lees explains how Citizens School in Dubai assesses six core skills — including resilience, empathy and self-awareness — on the same report card as academic grades. Duncan Grey, running a traditional A-level school, makes the case for why exams still matter to the families his school serves — while being candid about everything they fail to capture.

Inside the full recording, you'll hear the panel get into the economics of exam boards, the question of whether universities are actually ready for alternative assessment evidence, what it takes to bring anxious parents along on a journey of change, and why — as one panellist puts it — "we're not robots, and we're not trees. We can move."

And if you'd rather get the headlines first, we've also distilled the panel's sharpest thinking into a key takeaways resource including the six-skills framework one school is using alongside academic grades, and the panel's view on where assessment is heading next.

Both the full recording and the key takeaways resource are available below, just pop in your details to access them.

No Exams, No Problem? How Schools Are Protecting Outcomes Without Formal Assessment is part of the Outstanding Schools webinar series. Featuring Andrew Spencer (Wes Green International School), David Lees (Citizens School Dubai), Duncan Grey (British School of Amsterdam) and Louise Dawson (Inclusion Specialist), hosted by Tracy Moxley (iCademy).