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A student steps on to the stage. It’s professionally lit with a technician at the control desk for the high-end lighting rig. Costume rails are in the wings, outfits ready for changes that can be checked in full-length mirrors.

Later that afternoon, another student begins the same A-level drama examination on a cleared patch of assembly-hall floor that also serves as the school’s PE space.

Chairs are stacked against the wall. Two portable lights have been wheeled in from a cupboard. The “wings” are the PE changing rooms.

Marking blind, seeing everything

Both students were taking exactly the same examination and, officially, the system treats them as equals. It does not recognise school fees or postcodes.

For A-level drama examiners, such as myself, who travel between schools assessing performances against a national mark scheme, this means that we mark blind, too: interpretation, vocal control, physical characterisation and clarity of meaning.

It is content that matters, not context. Yet blindness is not the same thing as fairness.

The first school’s theatre had been designed for performance. Lighting states were programmed in advance. Sound cues were precise. Students moved easily through rehearsal rooms equipped with mirrors and sprung floors.

The room itself taught them how theatre works.

They knew instinctively how a voice carries across a stage, how light shapes a scene, how movement reads from the back of the auditorium.

Years of rehearsing and performing in a real theatre had given these students a confidence that cannot easily be manufactured elsewhere.

Overcoming the odds

The second school had achieved something far more difficult.

Its teachers had produced theatre where almost none of the infrastructure existed.

Tape marks were carefully laid on the hall floor. Props were arranged on a desk. Students had rehearsed wherever space could be found - classrooms, corridors, occasionally the hall itself between assemblies.

At the first school, a lighting cue followed an actor across the stage with precision.

At the second, a student stepped briefly into darkness because the single spotlight had to be moved between scenes.

None of this appears in the mark scheme.

Exam boards cannot acknowledge such differences. A national qualification cannot operate with separate standards for separate types of school. The principle of equal assessment is essential.

A two-tier system

But anyone who spends time travelling between schools during examination season knows that England now runs two education systems under the pretence of one, and it is in the arts where this is most pronounced.

At many independent schools, the arts remain central to the life of the institution. Productions are celebrated events. Facilities are built to support them. Many of these schools possess theatres and studios that would be the envy of a local arts centre. Theatre is treated as a serious intellectual and artistic discipline.

In many state schools, drama survives only because individual teachers refuse to let it disappear.

The reasons are not mysterious. Over the past decade, the curriculum has narrowed. Accountability measures have pushed schools towards a smaller group of “core” subjects. Arts departments have shrunk or closed altogether.

The result is predictable.

Equality in name only

One group of students grows up learning theatre in environments designed for it. Another group learns to improvise theatre in assembly halls and corridors. Both groups sit the same examination.

The exam system insists that this represents equality.

Anyone who visits schools knows that it does not.

Yet the most remarkable thing about the examination season is not the inequality itself. Anyone familiar with English education already knows that resources are unevenly distributed.

The remarkable thing is the determination of students and teachers in the least-resourced schools to produce theatre at all.

Against the odds, the lights come up - whether from a fully programmed rig or a single portable spotlight - and the students step forward to perform.

They perform the same scenes. They are judged by the same mark scheme. They are told that the system treats them equally. The stages on which they stand tell a different story.

Kevin Morris is a former head of English and drama and director of initial teacher education. He now works as an education consultant and examines A-level drama and theatre. He writes here in a personal capacity

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