Competition -at it's best?

Hey, remember the summer? 'Course you do, sport, sport and sport! London at its best and hundreds of the world's best athletes straining every sinew, giving everything they had just to be that fraction of a second, those few millimetres better than the rest. You couldn't miss it whether you were lucky enough to get a ticket to one of the venues or just shouted at the TV.l

Many said it was inspiring, a lesson in life for the young but was this reflected when the annual crop of exam results came out later? Sadly, of course not.

Sport is very simple: it's about being the best on the day, full stop. It's the same at a job interview, you may not be the actual best applicant but your performance at the interview is what counts.

The exams our schoolchildren take work to a different system. In the old days of O Levels and (unreformed) A levels grades were set at fixed percentages. The top 5% of marks got an A, the next 10% a B and so on. Very simple but actually inherently unfair unless the sole pupose of the exam was for selection. As any exam paper will vary slightly over the years in terms of difficulty, the pass marks varied too.

In a year with a hard paper the pass mark for an A may be 68/100, in another with questions which proved easier to answer it may be 71/100. 'Fair enough' you might say. But what if your child scored 69 and got a B and you knew that on last year's paper that would have been an A?

Not so fair now, is it?

This changed with the advent of GCSEs, which took a new approach, essentially setting a standard. Mark schemes become more complex and comprehensive, awarding points for specific items in an answer and if you got those items you got the points. Fairer all round, no? This would show what soemone actually knew not just their relative position in their year group.

Guess what? Problems soon emerged. teachers caught on to the new system (helped by guidance from the exam boards of course).  They taught their pupils what to look for and what to say in answers and so GCSE grades and pass rates rose year on year until this one. Ministers took praise for ever rising school standards while employers and university tutors struggled to deal with the rising tide of the innumerate and illiterate with 'good GCSE passes' who could barely  string two words together or calculate a percentage discount.

But this year it all fell off a cliff.

Pass rates declined and there was a huge furore over the GCSE English results.  The full story behind  is yet to emerge and with pending legal action it's best not to go much further. Suffice to say that no doubt those in charge will escape blame.

Is there an answer? Well the key question must be: What is this exam for? If it is for selection, whether to a degree course, further study or employment, then a return to simple ranking may be an answer. But if we want to know was my child's teacher any good? If we want to know does he or she have a good grasp of the knowledge and undertsanding of this subject, then we have to accept that an absolute measure will always rise over time.

Last thought. The driving test is a straightforward test of knowledge and skills. If you can demonstrate them on the day, than that's it. You pass. There are no quotas or limits.

What's your view on this comment below please.

Thanks for reading

Lessons learnt

After our children’s health the thing that’s most important to parents is their education, so why is it all going so wrong? I’ve worked in the exam industry (and it is an industry) for 25 years now so can speak from an inside perspective.

The rot started in the sixties and became endemic through the seventies and eighties as teacher training courses churned out teachers committed to anti-elitism and left wing values. Not that this was by all chance,  some months ago I came across a paperback of the era charmingly entitled 'teaching as a subversive activity', says it all really.

Labour's policy of mass immigration and multiculturalism in the nineties brought more decline via the route of moral and cultural relatism. If no culture could be seen as superior or better in any way then nothing could be criticised.

There were attempts to push back but the grip of the unions and the education establishement, sometimes referrred to as the 'Blob' for its capacity to resist all attempts to change it, was too strong.

So goodbye to grammar, 'proper' english and correct spelling and hello to ever rising GCSE pass rates. Competitive sport was either banned or discouraged; children told to stop a yard before the finish line and then holding hands jump over together. What a perfect introduction to the real world that was.

Despairing parents gazing in horror at their local 'sink' comp moved or bankrupted themselves going private.

So when the coalition came in and Michael Gove began his reforms the Blob rubbed their palms in glee at  the prospect of a new challenge.

But it has worked out differently this time. Gove is serious and correctly pushed through the most radical proposals in the early stages of  the parliament. Academies are becoming the norm, Free schools, Studio Schools and University Technical Colleges are open across the country. Outside the control of local authorities, free to set their own pay rates and teaching days they are beginning to make a difference to hundreds of young lives.**

Reforms have started in the failed public exam system and for the first year since their introduction GCSE pass rates stopped rising. There is a long way to go and the Blob is as strong as ever. So I'm only cautiously optimistic.

But it's a long overdue start and that's worth remembering.*

**Caution, sadly these reforms only apply in England; Wales still languishes under the socialists. The result of this can be seen in the ever declining standards of literacy and numeracy that are reported year on year. Scotland of course has had its own education system since the Act of Union.


*If anyone reads this then my next post will be on the real story behind this summer's GCSE scandal.