The government is using the words ‘carping’ and ‘doom-mongers’ again. This can mean only one thing: that exam results are out.
Sure enough this year’s GCSE results have been released, showing a 2.3 percentage point increase on last year’s results. Schools Minister Jim Knight hoped to pip critics to the post by arguing that there was no room for carping as the government had reached its target of 60% ‘good’ (A*-C) grades, ‘a year early’. The results are unlikely to silence critics however, particularly once maths and English are brought in.
The figures for 1006/2007show that 46.5% of pupils achieved five or more A*-C GCSEs, once English and maths are included. The importance of the inclusion of maths and English is because of their paramount importance to pupils’ future progress as well as academic foundation; something to which the government has conceded by introducing maths and English into its headline data. Under half, 48%, of all Key Stage 4 pupils have achieved an A*-C in maths and English.
Taken at face value, that over half of all pupils at Key Stage 4 are not achieving five ‘good’ grades is worrying; if we look at the background to these results, it is even more so. Dr Robert Coe of Durham University has found by tracking results over time that alterations to the exams have allowed pupils to achieve higher grades with the same standard of achievement. Using the Year Eleven Information System (YELLIS) test, Dr Coe found that a C grade today would have been awarded a D in 1996 in several subjects including maths. The significance of this is a) that the number of ‘good’ GCSEs across the country may well be artificially bolstered and b) even more importantly, there is cause to believe that making the exams more ‘accessible’, in order to produce better results, has narrowed the learning scope at Key Stage 4.
In other words, we are seeing a toxic cocktail of underachievement and target chasing: and unsurprisingly it’s leaving a nasty taste: swelling numbers of young people neither in education or employment, poor behaviour in secondary schools and of course, poor basic skills.
Comments (1)
The hard left assault on education continues. Early in the twentieth century, communists realised that inflation was almost as good as revolution itself when it came to humbling the "bourgeoisie". Society having at last woken up to this and taken steps, the ever destructive left turned its attention to schools. Grade inflation - a term which captures exactly what is going on - is yet another attempt to deprive the successful or their success. It is doubly ingenious in that not only does it obscure all distinction between abilities but it rests on an education system which leaves vast tracts of mind fallow and uncultivated. Equally, the sort of skills which risk turning a nicely turbulent and ignorant mass of unemployables into a sober sided working class, that sheet anchor of so-called "bourgeois" society, are entirely forgotten. Result? A demoralised, uncompetetive middle class; an angry, frustrated, crime tinged underclass and an apparent need for endless, further extensions of state power. This is supposedly utopia or a point on the way to utopia or at any rate better than the wicked worldly happiness and efficiency of "capitalism". Anyway, since most of the leading luminaries of the left are in essential agreement with 1984's O'Brien, that truth is what they tell us it is, the actual facts of experience are of no consequence to them. People will one day find themselves so set about with manipulative force that they will be squeezed into a state of endless bliss. This is seriously what those of us who reject the sophistry of the left are up against and the fight to reclaim schooling must be begin at once. Bravo, Miss de Waal, for taking up the cudgels so effectively.
Posted by Simon Denis | October 20, 2007 11:51 AM
Posted on October 20, 2007 11:51