I am very proud of what Team GB achieved in the hugely
successful London 2012 Olympics - my personal highlight was being present at
Wembley to cheer on our women against Brazil in the football, along with a
crowd of 70,000....and what a haul of medals....all those fabulous Golds,
Silvers and Bronzes....FAR better than our previous Olympians of recent history
managed to achieve. Based on Mr Gove’s logic, rather than the joyous outcome of
a huge investment of time, money and expertise combined with immense
dedication, effort and courage on the part of our athletes, is it just that the
whole thing has just got a lot easier? I mean, was it 1996 when we only
achieved one gold? How many in 2012?
Surely a brilliant example of gold, rather than grade, inflation?
As a teacher I have
endured the annual farce where the achievements of hard-working students are
belittled by politicians and other commentators who seem to feel entitled to
comment, not because they have any experience of teaching and what it entails,
but simply because they once went to school, which is a bit like saying that
you are expertly qualified to comment on the reasons for our swimming team’s
underachievement because as a child you splashed up and down a pool with more
than a passing resemblance to a sheep dip wearing inflatable arm bands and a
slab of polystyrene. ‘I managed to get
from one end of the pool to the other as a kid without drowning so I fail to
see why these athletes can’t do it, and a lot faster. What’s wrong with them?’
Data is very much part of our current life in
education....minimum target grades, tracking, predicting, intervening,
analysing....and it does indeed have an important role to play in ensuring
students achieve ‘their full potential’... but behind every grade and statistic
is an individual young person for whom we should be opening doors, not closing
them.....exploring opportunities and identifying strengths and talents to be
encouraged and weaknesses to be addressed. Playing with grade boundaries in
order to massage statistics for politically convenient goals completely betrays
the individual students behind those grades, and to a lesser extent their
teachers, who have had no option other than to work within the educational
system successive politicians have created for them.
And of course there is the subjective argument that the
exams are somehow easier. Well my experience of constant essay-writing for my
geography A Level was certainly different to what our present cohort have to
deal with, involving investigative research and analysis of collected data.
Different, not harder. A different set of skills for a completely different
time.... when ‘google’ was what you did when you actually couldn’t make it from
one end of the swimming pool to the other and the only use for your thumb was
to split the peel of an orange.
Bring back O Levels? Didn’t the ‘O’ stand for ‘Ordinary’? Is
that really an appropriate title for a qualification for the future? As exams
are all so ‘easy’, how about ‘E Levels’?
We could have an advanced exam, only for Clever students, called ‘C Levels’.....as a geography teacher I could
then explain to my students that my expectations of them for the forthcoming
exam on coasts and climate change would be below ‘C level’.......
We need an education system where examinations are a
rigorous and consistent benchmark of achievement for students that enable them to demonstrate the skills and
knowledge employers and Higher Education Institutions require. What we don’t
need is political meddling in the National Curriculum and its assessment, with successive governments wrecking the
life-chances of young people for the purpose of pursuing political ideology.
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