The Welsh Question
Sometimes I tell myself I’m being too hard on Nick Clegg, I mean he’s unused to people taking him seriously, he’s not been in the public eye for very long really of course he’s going to cock it up. He probably has policies of his own I’m just not looking hard enough for them. There must be something that differentiates the Lib Dems from a Conservative whipping boy it’s just not very evident.
Then something like this happens.
You remember the GCSE row and the Coalition’s (I refuse to call that shower a ‘government’) brilliant idea to replace them with the English Baccalaureate (EBac). Well this happened in Wales too, obviously, and they have a slightly different regulatory system there. Instead of the ‘independent’ regulator Ofqual, the Welsh minister has regulatory responsibilities, and he’s decided to exercise them and had the papers in question regarded. Unlike their English neighbours.
Clegg as always is fighting the Conservatives’ corner but this time, if the BBC is to be trusted, all cognitive power left him when the urge to endear himself to the Tories struck.
Clegg apparently thinks that the Welsh are ‘”shifting goalposts” for children in Wales’, forgetting that the main problem with these changes to exams was that they happened in the middle of the academic year; so that those children who (if they could) took the exams in January had an easier time of it that their peers who took the exam in the summer. The goalposts have already been shifted, this year was effectively weighted in favour of those who took the exam in January, the goalposts are being movedback.
Saying “I know what they say but I don’t think it’s right for politicians to be interfering in an independent exam system” Clegg seems to have forgotten that the minister is the regulator of the Welsh exam boards and fully within his rights to act as he has done. He also seems determined to ignore the fact that the issue of examination and assessment is already politicised and it would be naïve to think of the exam boards as independent when Gove’s opinions are so obvious, as I have argued previously.
But the most noticeable sore in this sorry body is the characterisation of the re-grading as a unilateral decision, implying that they shouldn’t have taken this step without, I don’t know, asking permission?
Outrageous isn’t it? But ripping out the entire systemand replacing it with theEbacs, that’s a “sensible” decision, an example “for the Welsh government and the Welsh politicians to decide whether they want to follow”.
The only conclusion I can draw is that the Welsh are showing too much independence. The Welsh should just learn their place goddamnit, and do exactly what daddy Cameron tells them.
Just as Clegg does.
The Theodosian Connection 