We all know the old saying: there’s lies, then there’s damnable lies and and there’s government education statistics:
Leading independent schools are preparing to abandon GCSE, one of the central props of the Government’s tottering exam system.
Pupils at leading schools commonly take 12 subjects, many of them a year early, and up to 90 per cent of the papers are graded A* or A.
“It’s like Boy Scouts collecting badges,” said Tony Little, who has just completed his first year as head of Eton. “One has to ask what the educational value of it is.”
Methinks that Mr.Little is being polite. I suspect that what he really wants to say is that an exam system that is so ‘dumbed-down’ as to ensure that virtually nobody fails is about as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. Handing every schoolchild lots of certificates to wave around doesn’t mean that they have actually been educated.
The elite schools’ decision to break ranks without waiting to see the details of the Government’s plan to replace GCSE and A-levels with a national diploma will alarm Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary.
It suggests the schools have no faith in the Government’s claim that academic standards will be protected from further debasement.
And they are right not to have any faith because the government is not concerned about education it is merely anxious to present lots of impressive statistics in order to convince everyone (including themselves) that children are being educated instead of merely processed. This isn’t education it’s a puppet show.
However, it is difficult to hide the sordid truth from the people whose business it is to actually help young people learn lots of things and it is gratifying to witness some of them breaking rank. Hopefully this is the start of a trend as people who truly value education begin to realise that it is far too important and precious to be left to the government.
I took the first year of GCSEs way back in the late 80s. After getting 7 out of the 8 above grade C I started A-levels. The first six months of A-levels (maths, further maths, physics) were spent teaching us the things that previous O-level students were taught to allow us to start the A-level syllabus!
For anyone to accept that the standards have remained the same when a new top grade had to be invented is delusional. A* indeed.
Next they’ll be giving places at Oxbridge to good sportsmen and women instead of scholars. Doh!!
Matt:
While almost all Oxbridge undergraduates are now selected on academic merit and suitability for the tutorial system, there is one quiet exception: organ scholarships.
Organ Award candidates have a DIFFERENT admissions exercise, in September rather than December. Unlike ANYONE ELSE, they can apply to both Oxford and Cambridge. And although if no-one academically up to it applies, a college will leave the place unfilled, competition for places is not high, so that if the college reckons they can get the candidate through the course with a second-class degree, they’ve got a good chance of getting a place.
These organ scholar places are not on the general quota, so they don’t deprive anyone else of a place.
But it’s worthy of note that the one easier route into these institutions, assuming that you can play the organ, entails signing up to play at n church services every week…
I was one of the last doing O levels, and was mocked at university by my friends for asking, when someone mentioned them, “What’s a CSE?”.
I have to say, I found O levels disappointing and dreary. A levels were the first time I felt I was being taken seriously and being allowed to do some actual thinking and learning, as opposed to just memorising.
The beginning of A levels was what I mistakenly thought the beginning of O levels were going to be like when I was eleven – only pointlessly delayed until four wasted precious years later.
Have to agree about A Levels. After completing my GCSE’s and going to college, I got the shock of my life.
Forgive my ignorance, but in Britain do you assign grade levels by letter instead of number like we do in the US? would O Level correspond to something like the 11th grade of high school here and so on? just curious.
Don’t know what 11th grade of high school means, Matt. But the O-level exam was what secondary school pupils in high schools / grammar schools (selective of the more academically able) used to take at the end of their fifth year, in however many subjects they wanted or were thought capable of tackling: bright guys at my school in the 1960s took up to ten subjects, I took eight, failed Latin…
This exam replaced (in the 1950s?) the earlier Scool Certificate system that my dad went through in the 1930s, and was itself replaced by GCSE in the mid-1980s, which combined the O level (supposedly) with the CSE exams that were taken by less academic students. This was instituted for egalitarian (read “social engineering”) reasons. If they did well at o-level / GCSE, students could opt to spend a furthet two years at school doing the A (Advanced) level exams, in usually two or three subjects but sometimes more.
After a whimsical and aimless series of jobs in factories, offices, shops etc, I ended up as a teacher for quite a few years. I taught mostly English at O level, then GCSE, and also at A level. On the whole it was a dispiriting experience teaching literature to students who didn’t like books, that kind of thing, but illuminating too. Especially in the ’90s I started to get lots of students passing English who were, in my opinion, semi-literate at best. Any honest analysis of state education ought to convince anyone that the state and education should be kept firmly separated. Right now I’m paying for extra tuition for my son to remedy the gaps in his state primary education, in the hope that he’ll get into a good grammar school, nearest thing to private education I can afford…
Long before schoolmasters were called Kevin, when Anthony Crossland drew breath and failure at aged eleven marked you for life, I was told something by my chalk-white history master, Charlie Rainford, that I have never forgotten. “Officially, one year’s pupils,” he said, “is assumed to be the intellectual equal of every other. So differences from year to year in the markings of exam papers are taken to signify variations in the difficulty of said papers, and are corrected accordingly.”
This honourable principle sustained the marking regime for years, perhaps generations. When it disappeared under a welter of expedient, headline-grabbing improvements in exam results I found myself withholding just a smidgeon of belief in the boundless skills of NUT members and the much lauded work-ethic of the modern student. Are our youngsters really swats when, basically, we just bunked off? I knew that wasn’t right. I still believed old Rainford.
How delightful, then, to find that our leading independent schools have ditched the “all shall have prizes” mentality that GCSE’s encapsulate. I hope that the rest of the independent sector follows suite. This new, confident attitude is especially timely as Offa prepares to deny our children their rights to a university place. It sends the message out that independent schools are genuinely focussed on quality not quantity, while this government’s educational policies are all about spin and bureaucratic waste dressed up as social engineering.
The Government are trying to put a spanner in the works of Eton’s plans to bypass GCSE, by decreeing that a number of GCSEs shall be part of the entry requirement for university.