Back To School
“England’s exam system is “diseased” and “almost corrupt”, says a former government adviser in a book on Labour’s education policy.
A former director at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Mick Waters, says exam boards are conniving in the dumbing-down of school exams.”
OK, he has a book to sell and needs to make a pretty dramatic statement to sell said book.
But lets face it Education, Education, Education has been a political football for most of the last sixty years. As with anything that becomes a State monopoly it just allows standards to degenerate and figures get manipulated to serve political targets.
The Butler Education Act of 1944 had a very sensible tripartite system that acknowledged that education had to be relevant to those being educated, rather than pander to social engineering system that required ’50% of young people to go to University’. Not everybody wanted to do a fine arts degree, some people wanted to be engineers, others to get technical skills. All of which meant that education was largely relevant because youngsters could see a future.
When even getting an academic degree is now seen to be largely unimportant to future success, because of the glut of people holding degress, we are in severe danger of becoming a nation devoid of real learning and skills.
I went to a ‘Technical School’ that rapidly turned in the second year into a Grammar school, because thats what the teachers wanted. Whilst I ended up studying for my French ‘A’ levels in a wood working shop fully equipped with rusting tools and machinery. Getting an Engineering apprenticeship at Rolls Royce was as much cause for celebration by staff and school as was getting a place at Warwick, Bristol or Durham (Oxbridge was still seen as out of our league)
Impossible Social Engineering and the latest groovy social theories have been played out with dire consequences for the country, industry and worst of all for students themselves. The quality of industrial management and of civil adminstration have degraded beyond anything thought possible. The case of Damian McBride is a case in point. A Civil Servant who failed to even comprehend the Civil Service Code and ethos.
This was a man who wrote a final year supervised dissertation at Peterhouse, Cambridge in praise of inciting violence and rumour-mongering in politics entitled Far More Important Than Politics? Public Policy and the Impact of Urban Riots, 1964-8.
In a desperate attempt to create a one size fits all education system, standards have been clearly dragged down not up.
The only way to create a world class education system is to take the State out of the equation perhaps save for funding school vouchers. Let Technical colleges, Universities and establish bodies like MIT to set their own entry requirements.
After sixty years of tinkering all the State has done is bring education to its knees.
Andrew P Withers
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September 20, 2010 at 08:45 -
It’s even more painful when you see the false, vomit-inducing sincerity when Blair made that speech so many years ago…education…ha, your last two paragraphs say it all.
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September 20, 2010 at 09:04 -
Peterhouse? Ah…well that explains a lot. No good ever comes out of that college
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September 20, 2010 at 09:41 -
The educational establishment screams in anger whenever anyone mentions ‘dumbing down’, but it’s a fact. Standards have gone down. I was an examiner for the NEA (formerly JMB) in the North back in the 1980s – in English Language GCSE. We were instructed by the Chief Examiner that errors in spelling and grammar should not be penalised unless they interfered with meaning. In other words, if you could understand it, you gave it credit. I can understand that approach in History, for example, where you are testing understanding in a specific topic, but not in English. It was justified (and still is, whenever ‘modern’ exam papers are compared to older ones) by saying that we are testing for different things these days – different, but just as relevant and demanding. That’s nonsense, of course. If you don’t test for spelling and grammatical ability in Eng Lang, where do you? Bear in mind this wasn’t trendy teachers (many of the examiners were old-fashioned types), but a direct instruction from the Chief Examiner. Any time anyone says there is no ‘dumbing down’, remember that.
For me, the rot started to set in around the same time, when exam boards moved from norm-referencing (where, say, 10% of the cohort are awarded an A, and so on) to criteria-referencing (where anyone achieving a certain set of criteria gets an A, and so on). Criteria are mutable things and get rewritten every year, which is how we get to the situation where 90% of all examinees get an A, or some such nonsense. If we had stuck with norm-referencing, with all its faults, this situation could not have happened, and the A* would never have needed to be invented.
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September 20, 2010 at 13:09 -
I remember from my schooldays that integral and differential calculus were part of the O-Level maths curriculum (I never understood it because of inept teachers). I don’t believe it’s even part of A-Level now..
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September 20, 2010 at 17:50 -
I remember doing integral and differential calculus in the fourth form as part of the O-Level maths syllabus. I wasn’t even in the top set. We were handed out log tables immediately before the exams to ensure we couldn’t write formulae in them. Calculators? Too expensive.
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September 20, 2010 at 15:36 -
I argued, back when there were still GCEs, that even norm referencing was a dumbing down.
The brightest kids always did GCEs but as more and more kids, with overall lower abilities, were pushed into the exams standards dropped.
One of the biggest failures of the current system is the demand that everyone sits the same exam at 16. At my Grammar. back in the 60s/70s the brightest sat their GCEs at 15, the rest at 16. My brother at the secondary modern sat them at 17.
All kids are different and need different styles of education and different lengths of time to learn and absorb. My four children have gone to four different schools because they had different requirements. One size does not fit all.
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September 20, 2010 at 21:20 -
There were also the CSEs – which (when I was at school in the 60s) were taken by those who were in lower streams or in secondary modern schools, and were more practically-based for potential apprentices. These were amalgamated with the O Levels to become GCSEs – I think that was in the mid 80s. That was certainly a major step in the diminution of the standard.
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September 21, 2010 at 17:11 -
If I recall correctly (and it is a while ago), the norm-referencing covered the entire year’s cohort, i.e. a grade A was awarded to (say) 10% of the 16-year-olds that year, regardless of whether they entered the exam or not. So no matter whether some extra buffoons were entered, an A was still an A. Each exam board referenced against its own cohort, so there were regional variations. The downside was that, if you were unlucky enough to be in a ‘good’ year, then getting an A was statistically harder – but that, to me, is a lot better than constantly changing (and relaxing) the criteria to make sure that the numbers looked good year on year.
GCE, CSE, 16+, GCSE, As and A*s – the whole thing needs to be torn up and a fresh start made. And made demanding again, with a reliance on proper exams. With coursework, the best grades go to those with the most educated and committed parents – hardly the leg up for the poor and disenfranchised that they are touted to be.
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September 20, 2010 at 13:09 -
Three education related stories in a row! A bit of a theme growing here.
Oh, and spot on Andrew. 50% or 100% to be university educated means that some jobs which society needs will not get filled. Bin men will be needed and they don’t need degrees. Unless this goverment goes the same way as the last one and imposes them just like Labour who said that nursery school teachers should be degree qualified.
Some kids are good with their hands. They can become bricklayers, joiners, etc. Some kids are good with their heads. They can become scientists, accountants, etc. Some are creative. They can become artists and designers. Others aren’t. They are probably fine with working on production lines. Some people are empathtic and can be good nurses or teachers. Others aren’t and would probably find a job away from the public. Yes this is all generalisations, but society is made up of a huge variety of jobs and tasks and society is made up a huge variety of human beings of all shapes, sizes and personalities. Everyone can find their niche.
So rather than be fair to everyone and go down to the lowest common denominitor (as with the current exam system), teach to the kids abilities. Yes it requires teachers to actually teach rather than guide them into passing exams, but you get better educated people at the end of it. A bit like a manager who works with his staff and uses their abilities in the best way possible and molds himself to them. So if someone can be set a task and left, then he ignores them. If someone else needs micro management, then he gives it to them. A bad manager and a bad teacher and a bad education system just imposes one method and forces the staff (or pupils) to follow it. So a bad manager will either micro manage or do too little, meaning that a number of his staff aren’t being managed effectively.
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September 20, 2010 at 13:21 -
So many of the curses of modern education hail back to the 1960s and the pathological aversion to streaming that evidenced itself then – and remains to this day. There has always been an underlying assumption that it is intrinsically better to be academic than skilled, so more of a premium has been placed on university education than vocational training and apprenticeships. This assumption has certainly contributed to the overkill in numbers of those going into tertiary education – and also the decline in standards of academic achievement. Why won’t socialists face up to the fact that not all people have the same mental or physical skills? Is their egalitarianism a substitute for commonsense?
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September 20, 2010 at 13:52 -
“In a desperate attempt to create a one size fits all education system, standards have been clearly dragged down not up.”
The desire to increase pass rates year on year has been equally destructive. There are 3 reasons why rates might increase: Exams are getting easier, teachers are teaching to pass the test and/or we are getting more intelligent. I sincerely doubt it is the latter.
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September 20, 2010 at 14:08 -
Now, pay attention class!
Below are two Physics exam papers to test 16 year old children. They are an “O” level from 1977 and a GCSE from 2009.
The authorities claim that these papers are equivalent and that they are equally challenging to our children. We are supposed to believe that an A grade in the 1977 paper is the same as an A grade in the 2009 paper
In the paper below, candidates have 10 minutes to answer all questions.
No calculators, swearing or banging heads on desks are allowed.
Candidates will gain no marks for pointing out the uselessness of socialist education policies as this is a bleedin obvious fact.
Candidates must please leave this exam session quietly and not give in to the tempataion of punching the first useless politician/ senior educator that they encounter.
Q1.
Why does the 2009 curriculum NOT cover Newton’s laws of motion and yet the 1977 curriculum did?Q2.
Why does the 2009 general science curriculum cover “global warming” and the “precautionary principle” which are products of left-wing politicised pseudo science and are unproven by empirical fact?Q3.
Why does the 2009 exam have a few superficial equations to calculate with the formulae helpfully provided but the 1977 paper has complex multi-part calculations that require logic as well as numeracy skills and DO NOT have the formulae provided?Q4.
Why do universities consider freshmen foreign students and privately schooled students to be hugely better educated than their British state-educated counterparts?Q5.
Why is it so easy for incorrect pseudo science to gain popular support in this country? E.g. over-hyped bird flu scares, global warming, wind farms, waste disposal policies, …Q6.
Why has no teacher been sacked for incompetence in the state sector (well, virtually none in the last 20 years)?-
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September 20, 2010 at 14:51 -
Why does the 2009 paper have lots of multiple choice answers whilst the 1977 requires the student to explain their answers.
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September 20, 2010 at 14:54 -
Are you saying that 2009 paper is the real article?
My 1957 O level papers were a tad harder than the ’77 one you show – just looked them up, but that ’09 paper has to be a con job. If it’s not, then it is easy to see why the country is in the mess it is.
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September 20, 2010 at 16:27 -
Ivan,
Yes, the 2009 Physics paper IS real, it’s not a spoof.
What’s more this is the MOST difficult science GCSE course taught at my child’s school. The school only allows the most able science students to take this Physics GCSE as part of the Triple Science course (three spearate Physics, Chemistry and Biology GCSEs).
The other students are split up into the less able who can take the much easier single science GCSE or double GCSE and then at the lower end of the scale the least scientific students will take the even easier BTEC Diploma in Applied Science.
So, prizes for all then. Even the school congratulates itself by saying 35% of its GCSE grades were A or A*. What !!!!!!!!!! ?
This should be taken into account with the fact that some of these grades were awarded for courses with 100% coursework and many were for such demanding subjects such as Tourism, Hairdressing, Construction, Media, Dance, and ICT (NOT learning how to programme a computer, but learning how to click the right menu option on a computer screen).
The 2009 Physics paper above was set by the exam board OCR as part of their “Twenty First Century Science” series of GCSE exams. It makes someone who is scientifically well-educated like myself almost weep, especially as my child is experiencing this drivel.
Many of the state secondary schools in our area use this ridiculous “Twenty First Century Science” GCSE. Of course it has nothing to do with getting better grades for schools, does it? Never mind a school’s responsibility to help our children acquire the best levels of knowledge.
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September 20, 2010 at 18:21 -
Many years ago I was a maths teacher for my sins – before I went full time into engineering. That ‘paper’ is about as difficult as the ’20 questions’ I used to throw at a class at the beginning of a lesson just to keep them on their toes.
We need to get back to the old levels of education – I would say as far back as the system we had in the 50s, where individual ability was looked at and children were given the education that stretched them.
At one stage I did a little supply teaching and I had children in the lower school doing algebra at a level way above those in the first two years of upper school – and the kids were enjoying it! The school got a new head and I went back to engineering because my way of doing things didn’t fit in with the new progressive, don’t teach outlook.
I have often wondered what could be achieved if you took a group of very bright children and stretched them just to see what they could do in real life – I have written a story about such a boarding school and the children and what I think they would be capable of.
In your child’s case, I hope you are doing some home schooling in an endeavour to foster knowledge of science.
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September 22, 2010 at 08:13 -
Ha! I took that 1977 physics exam, never thought I’d see the paper again.
Why is the 2009 exam peppered with unnecessary graphics, such as a skiing father + son & a F**king kettle FGS? A framework for daydreaming students to doodle on/colour in, perhaps?
It’s also disheartening to see that the O Level replacement is multiple choice & fill in the missing word format. Back in the day we were told, when answering O/A level exam questions to prepare a short summary & to write down our workingsinitially, to show that we understood the question & how we intended to answer it. I can’t see how the 2009 exam would give examinees a similar opportunity to demonstrate their comprehension & understanding of the issues involved in the question(s).
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September 20, 2010 at 18:48 -
Ah but dumbed down education produces people who do not question or think for themselves but who accept what they are told – ideal candidates for client state socialism.
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September 20, 2010 at 21:14 -
.. which of course is the reason for the dumbing down. I reckon the standards will drop further until the national educational standard will be what I would consider to be primary level.
And to think that we used to mock the Americans for having degrees that were the equivalent of our 1960s A levels.. how times have changed. Ignorance is Strength..
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September 20, 2010 at 20:15 -
With many examinations comprising “which one of the following four options…..”
It’s no surprise that, statistically, a blind, dumb chimpanzee has a chance of gaining a ‘pass’.
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September 20, 2010 at 20:59 -
I am in my 50s and do clerical work. I never got a degree of any kind.
I am self-taught on the computer, so when I was made redundant 10 years ago I was urged to go through an exam to prove I was computer literate.
We were given 1 1/2 hours to do the exam. The teacher was shocked when I completed it in 10 minutes. I further shocked her when I passed with 100%. However, I was told I would not have “distinction” put on my certificate, even though I deserved it. That was because it would offend the other candidates. . . .
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September 21, 2010 at 04:41 -
Completely agree with all the comments, I was one of the less smart and did GCSE’s, but I can remember doing quadratic equations, logarithms etc in the 4th year at Secondary Modern School, I went to do HNC and endorsements (not smart enough for university), most importantly I did however acquire a life long love of learning, mainly from old fashioned inspirational teachers. Let teachers teach and get rid of the politicians from education.
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