For me the era of GCSE and A level results is over. That annual stress is a thing of the past, thankfully. But it remains all too familiar to not mention four things.
The first is to offer congratulations to those who got the grades they hoped for. Working as hard as many did in quite exceptional circumstances justified the results. No one would have wished these sixth form years on those getting results yesterday. I also think the absence of other opportunity is an obvious explanation for grade inflation that seems to have been ignored, but which I suspect very real. Work was the substitute activity of choice when there was not much else to do. I am inclined to believe these results more than most do.
Second, I note that private schools saw most grade inflation. And yes, I think that does say those at such institutions did have the most favourable home environments to work in, and all the kit they needed, and so on. But, is that enough to explain the difference? Call me cynical, but I doubt it. When your product is A* results the temptation to inflate is great. That those with identical GCSE results apparently did much better at private schools compared to their similarly qualified state schools peer group suggests that there is something amiss here. It is essential that this be investigated.
That is because, thirdly, this system is working. Yes, I know it produces a slight bias to girls because continuous assessment always seems to, but overall I have a strong preference for coursework being the basis of educational assessment simply because in the real world we do not work in exam conditions so why demand that performance in that arena be the basis of appraisal? I have reflected this in my own teaching work at university, where I have resisted exam based appraisal.
And fourth? I suggest that we maintain this move to teacher appraisal now. Why would anyone now want to go back to the tyranny of exams when there are now better options? As education needs to be reappraised anyway, given the inevitable changes in the way that we live and the demise of so many supposed careers that is now inevitable in the face of climate change, what is the point in retaining the hierarchy that maintained them? Let's be much more realistic about the skills people need. Let's allow them to work in ways they clearly prefer. And let's let their effort rather than their ability to control short term memory under the stress of exam nerves shine through.
Sometimes crises produce good outcomes. If education changes for the better as a result of Covid there will be at least one silver lining.
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One of the travesties that could have been resolved is the application of real results for university places not predicted grades. Sure it would have been disruptive but after eighteen months of disruption – the bullet should have been bitten.
Is education about getting people to become the best they can? Or is it to sort and categorise them?
The current arrangements are a step towards the former…. which is to be encouraged. However, the change in mindset about what education is for has yet to occur in government.
Hear hear Richard, hear hear, s#@@ing exam system has always been shite – in my 60s now, work at a HEI, and through male white privilege (and good fortune and a little wit) I’ve done well compared to my bus driver Dad, and the least helpful thing were the exams which were only ever the means of restriction (aka creaming off the the better performers to create the illusion of meritocracy), yes, let’s have and end to them.
We need to decide what A levels (or their replacement) are for. Do they measure the current attainment of individual students at the end of two years of study, the way they have developed over two years, or their potential for further development? Are they a measure of the ability of the students’ teachers, or of their schools, in absolute or value added terms? Are they intended as a short term indication to sort students for university entrance, or to give a life-long signal of intellectual ability to potential employers? Or do we fudge it and try to do all of these at the same time, and risk failing to do any of them properly.
Once we have worked out what we want the results to achieve, we can think about whether it is better to test work continuously or periodically over two years (fifteen to eighteen months really, as there is little further teaching after Christmas in the second year, and essentially none after Easter) , or the level reached at the end.
I suppose I should draw back and ask the bigger question: what are school and university education for?
Obviously we want children to become literate and numerate. We also want a basic knowledge of history and geography, economics, literature, art, science, and the rest. More importantly, we want to grow people who have intellectual and pro-social skills – self confidence, self reliance, resilience, curiosity, empathy; the ability to think and rethink for themselves; to absorb information and solve problems; to formulate and express arguments, and to understand, dissect and respond to arguments made by others.
Outside academia and a few professions, I suspect there are few people who are using more than a tiny fraction of the knowledge they gained at school or university every day. But (I hope) their education has prepared them for life as an independent and functional member of society.
So from the abstract to the concrete: how do GCSEs and A levels help us to achieve that?
Candidly, they don’t
But I think some BTECs help, no end
The education system has always been devised by politicians and the ‘great and good’ with an eye on creating a “better” society.
We now in a period of unprecedented pace of change, with industrial might running rings around politicians and legislators in the name of shareholder value and at the pinnacle of a casino economy. This blog and numerous articles and publications are testament to what’s wrong and what the remedies might be, but often ignoring an overview of the route map for better societies and the world we want for our grandchildren.
Education must be a starting point and with a much greater emphasis on critical thinking from a very early age.
Children soon begin to discuss fairness when given time and it seems to me that fairness within society is what’s this blog is striving for.
Our current educational system does not have critical thinking at its heart . This results in young people entering the workplace with no good knowledge of what work is about, the role of pay and tax, the advantages and disadvantages of voting systems in a representative democracy or a good overview of how the world, national and local economies work.
So it’s hardly surprising when they see unfairness all around them that they do not know how to demand the sort of changes that will result in a rapid curbing of the excesses of neo-liberal capitalism.
Time is not on my side, so I encourage my children to ensure that my grandchildren think critically and to bring them up to be practical and resilient. These will be essential skills and attributes for the problem-solving the he world ahead.
This is a great idea for football and the Olympics – no need for pensioners too sit in the stands at Portman Road or for Tokyo 2020 and all that flying around mingling and risking the health of the Japanese.
Just assess the teams and individuals on their coursework.
I post this as evidence of the crass stupidity of the average right wing troll
I hadn’t considered the possibility that A levels are medals to be awarded to the top performing students each year, in a never ending war of all against all, but perhaps that is uncomfortably close to the truth. Perhaps we should lock them all in a sealed room for two years with enough food for half of them, and award university places to the ones who survive.
That’s the true neoliberal spirit 🙂
But would any change at all make the slightest bit of difference to the Bullingdon Club where it seems it’s who you know, not what you know. What use will good grades be then no matter how they are awarded?
Does the education system deliver what UK society requires? My experience of sitting in on recruitment interviews over the years, is that it does not. My favourite benchmark is Switzerland, where limited university access is balanced by quality vocational education.
My daughter – whose life is addled by mobile phone delivered social media – we’ve had everything from self harming, bulimia, body dysmorphia , lots of unhappiness and Covid lockdown as well as just being a teenager – managed to get two A* and an A and in English Lit, Sociology and History. Her teachers made her open her envelope and told her that she had indeed done really well. She has a firm offer now from Liverpool.
I can tell you also, when we had a celebratory drink last night with our 18 year old, her mother and I saw it as a team effort – getting her out of bed in the morning, lifts to school and back, catch up chats, liaising with her teachers (the school which is planning on becoming an academy soon has been really very good indeed) when performance suffered due to relationship problems, drug and alcohol experimentation etc. And yes, alongside the incessant encouragement there has been the odd good old fashioned bollocking too. Phew!
I advised her that if she were ever accused or derided for grade inflation she can tell her accuser to **** ***. She (and the rest of them) have bloody earnt their grades bless them.
I failed my A levels through lack of work but I was left to rue it for the rest of my life.
until I went to Uni as a mature student. But I was struck by the other students in my year – some of whom worked really hard and whom were very capable and still came out with D s just because of a bad final exam.
What is sickening about the current system is that teachers and schools have been kicked hard to improve performance and have delivered – more learning about how to learn for example – and then just as they create a set of excellent students with solid learning and revising skills, crap like grade inflation and artificial ‘worries’ about easier exams are filtered through deliberately so that the hard work of teachers is not recognised (typical for this Thatcherite addled country) and the kids hard work is undermined.
Tell me – what sort of sick system does that? Promotes excellence and then derides it when it is delivered?
A manipulative one with no interest in fairness or equality that’s what – one that just keeps changing the goalposts as it sees fit in order to limit opportunity and success to a limited chosen few.
And this is how they deal with the successful candidates. What about the others who need even more help and are essentially on their own? It’s a sobering thought eh?
Let’s have done with it as you suggest. But lets also have done with awful Government.
Well done to her
And you
I never realised how hard being a parent would be……
I have loved being one though
And mine have done their fair share of silly things too
Well done on that lass on getting that offer from Liverpool John Moores University
What are the chances of teachers pet getting better grades than the PITA?
Yeah, the idea of mass education is flawed….it’s been designed by teachers for teachers, , for the benefit of people who for the most part, have never left school or had a proper job.
Many of my infant / junior school teachers had served in the war…….
Oh come on, we don’t need a war to improve education
Your comment is ludicrous and insulting to teachers
Martin
I did 37 years at the chalk face but I did leave school. I grew up in a one parent family where my Mum was unable to work . I went to a secondary modern school and left at 16 with 7 O levels. I worked as a clerk then a factory labourer -better pay 3s 9d an hour. Desperate for teachers, they let me into a Teacher Training College on the strength of my O levels and being a corporal in the Air training Corps seemed to impress the interviewer. I got my degree later from the Open University, one of the great achievements of Wilson’s government. (nearly cancelled by the Conservatives: it only survived as the Chancellor, Iain Macleod died and was replaced by Barber.)
After retiring I spent 14 years as a counsellor. I know something about the wider world.
Our education in England and Wales was based on the 1944 Butler Act. He spent more time speaking to the churches than to the scientists or business people. Schools were to be run by local authorities and most divided schools into Grammars and Sec Mods. Some did not allow the Sec Mods to offer O levels. I was in a middle class area and parents insisted.
The O and A levels were not state designed . They were designed by the Universities to sift out people who could do degrees. The O s , we were told, could only be passed by 25% of the population. The reason for the two types of schools was that the Government took the advice of Sir Cyril Burt who said studies of identical twins raised apart showed, scientifically, that 80% of intelligence was inherited. Many years later it was discovered he had forged the results to fit his theory. His writings reveal he didn’t think many working class children were capable of abstract or ‘refined’ thought. We now know, and did at the time, that a stimulated brain develops better. The Primary schools of that era attracted observers from all over the world. They were run by teachers.
The Education reform Act of 1988 was also politician driven. It set a National curriculum and established Ofsted (where data is more important than local social conditions or other factors).
The National Curriculum had to be revised almost every year due to its shortcomings. In 1995 the former head the Post Office headed a commission which stopped changes for five years. he was our hero.
Today we have a variety of schools and an increasing number of academies run by various bodies who think they can deliver the education that the country needs. After 2010 Gove and Cummings decided further reform was needed and succeeded in uniting teachers against them. The usual phrase was dragging kicking and screaming into the modern world. I was out of it by then but I still invigilate and was a GCSE marker 2007 -2011.
I attended a psychotherapy conference in 2018 where a professor I respect ( social policy) but also a psychotherapist told us , to total agreement from the rest of us, that Private business is de-regulated while public services are micro-managed. He also surprised me by saying that in recent years he had an increasing number of clients for which his training and experience had not prepared him Basically people who were failing to meet their ‘targets’. His conclusion was that shame was the method of controlling an educated work force. 20 years ago we all had to set targets for the kids. Not totally wrong , of course, but often excessive.
People using those sort of methods are often running academy chains or ‘advising’ the Dept for education. ( a sort of privatisation of state education) What do we see today? Lots of kids pressured to get ever higher grades (whether for themselves or the school’s position is up for debate) and many suffering stress because of it. And a number giving up and not bothering. Plus , very often, a lot of good subjects, music, design, sport and art are neglected.
Schools and exams are NOT designed by teachers for teachers. They are designed by people with agendas in social engineering. Teachers are bogged down with needless and pointless paperwork. Most of it could be lost and we could let teachers run the schools. It would probably be better-as in Finland.
Thank you
I did quite well in O and A levels (showing my age there) because I am quite good at spending a month or so cramming my head full of information, spewing it out on paper, and then forgetting it a month of so later. You can get good grades like that not really educational! The only subjects I was interested in at the time were mathematics, mathematical physics and music but I didn’t learn much about them at school. Instead I read a lot of library books. I attended a supposedly “good” grammar school but much of what we did was a complete waste of time.
This resonates fully with me and you can add ACA and ATII (now CTA) exams to the list. The only thing they taught me was how to bust a gut when tired and under pressure to be ready for an event (deadline for delivering a report, big client meeting etc.) and in an emergency, wing it. I suppose that is a skill in itself but apart from that no studying for or taking any exam ever taught be anything or developed my character or skills in any way.
Agreed George
The problem is that exams are an easy (and relatively cheap) way for assessors to ration access to the next levels of education and so will be very hard for governments to ignore lobbying from the assessors and move forward to a more progressive method. But think of the outcry if access to driving licences was rationed to only a few thousand per year because that’s all there were places for. Basing the whole of someones future life on a short term memory test in stressful conditions is a very uneducated way to do things. Yes, a few professions need people who can remember what to do with minimum references, in short amounts of time, under high pressure such as surgeons in theatre, and pilots coping with airborne emergencies. But they are in a minority. Educator assessment over a longer time period where they get to know their pupils real abilities and capacities and see how they change and grow over time is a far better method of assessment. But it is more complex, time consuming and costly. Exams are a quick and simple way to judge. Quick, simple an in most cases a wrong way.
I totally agree that school asssessment is something that needs radical re-thought. However I wouldn’t go round saying so – a condition needed for that re-think to be properly done and work is that people* trust the Prime Minister and Education Secretary overseeing the process.
That condition is far from met.
[By which I mean all stakeholders, children, parents, educators, grade users such as universities and employers, etc].
This whole article reminded me of my own school years, where I struggled to pay attention but my younger brother sailed through top of his class every year and in his final year was school dux. He went on to university but didn’t manage to finish his first year.
School hadn’t taught him to teach himself.
May I thank Ian Stevenson for his thought provoking account from a very interesting inside perspective.
And also empathise with PSR and his daughter – we know a lad in the same position who as he put it “bloody earned their grades”. For half their course they couldn’t even go into school, and then this Spring when they finally could they knew that every little piece of homework or in-class test might be the camel’s straw that decides the grade boundary.
(Interestingly that lad has also got his place at Liverpool, which is also where my daughter will be starting her second year. Obviously the place to be!)
🙂
This period of educational disruption will continue for at least another three or four years. This incoming upper sixth (year 13 in 2021/22) had their GCSE year and that important lower six year heavily disrupted. The incoming lower sixth (year 12) had their last two GCSE years disrupted. The incoming GCSE cohort (year 11) have missed much of the first two years of their three year GCSE courses.
As you roll down through year 10 and year 9 hopefully the disruption becomes less important (and hopefully the universities are making sufficient adaptations that their are not missing too much by the time they graduate).
But then you hit those who’ve lost out on the groundwork that would have been laid in their early years/reception/year 1. There will be lots of work for academics in the next decade as these cohorts progress through their school career to look for differences in their socialisation, mental health, and academic achievement.
As an addendum: all the media seem to be speculating about Kemi Badenoch becoming Education Secretary. I am sure they won’t all have invented the same story about a slightly improbable successor without having received the same briefing – no doubt from Boris Johnson’s office.
More optimistically the Guardian posits Nadhim Zahawi as an alternative, and I suspect he would at least take the role seriously.
But … I also wonder whether this is all a smokescreen prepared to cover up more incompetence news tomorrow with GCSE results.
Are any of them up to the task?
A belief in equality is a prerequisite and I don’t identify that anywhere amongst the Tories
Well, it’s my son’s GCSE results today so fingers crossed!
What are the main aims of our education system?
I would say it should have a cultural, collective purpose. All main subject areas, e.g. mathematics, main languages (English, French and German), biology, physics, music, sports, basic sociology and psychology should be taught to all school children until the age of 17 or 18 years, whatever the particular subject labels are used. But the present system force young people to specialise too early. Also, specific skills, whether to analyse, debate, memorise etc. should be explicitly part of all subject learning. How should then learning outcomes be assessed? The main problem with basing grades on individual teachers’ views is fairness and objectivity. One major problem is the Internet. No teacher or lecturer can honestly state they are able to check all the Internet sources. Assessment needs to be a mix of various forms of examination, both external and teacher assessed, written and oral responses in the form of traditional exam papers, essays, presentations etc. What is also important is that all education allows resits, is continuous, free and paid for by the state. Education should not be a privilege but a right for all citizens of any age and circumstance.