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.

Lib Dem Disaster

So Nick Clegg has finally apologised for the hike in tuition fees.

No wait, let’s be accurate about this. He hasn’t apologised for raising the fees, he hasn’t apologised for being corrupted by the inkling of power. He hasn’t apologised for breaking, not just a promise, but his key election pledge. He has apologised for making a pledge that could not be kept.

Too little, too late. If this promise couldn’t be kept why did you make it? Does no one in the Lib Dem party own a calculator? Is the mathematics too difficult for you? Were you just cynical, this is what people will vote for and once we’re in they can’t do anything to us for five years? Or were you just that desperate for a little bit of attention, a little bit of importance, that you’d promise us the earth then make hollow apologies when you realised you couldn’t deliver?

The Liberal Democrats are an embarrassment.

They’ve thrown away every policy they were elected for, so desperate were they to get into Downing Street and start tonguing the Tory’s boots. All they are good for, and I use the word advisedly, is as a scapegoat for the Conservatives. A little sock-puppet to present the illusion of a government that actually has a popular mandate.

If the Lib Dems had any integrity they’d leave the coalition, call a general election and desperately try to salvage whatever dignity they can. But who am I kidding, politicians with integrity, silly idea, silly idea.

The GCSEs are Dead, Long Live the EBacs

So it’s finally happened, when it comes to examination Gove’s put his money where his mouth is, and his foot on top of both.

Yes the GCSEs are doomed, at least for maths, science and English, and I don’t expect the plans to extend this new English Baccalaureate to be deterred by anything as sordid as results when there is good old fashioned Tory dogma at stake.

Apparently the Baccalaureate will be assessed by one huge exam at the end of the course, which is two years barring future changes.  According to that spineless mass of gibbering jelly, Nick Clegg, these changes will

“raise standards for all our children”, but he added that it would “not exclude any children”

Well that’s very reassuring, because his record on education is just so reliable isn’t it?

But really, isn’t it the whole point that children are going to be left behind? Isn’t that what Gove and the Tory’s have wanted all along?

I may be delusional here, but I was under the impression that the problem with GCSEs, at least in the government’s eyes was that we had too many children passing and that that was devaluing the whole system. Surely then this is Gove’s aim, to reduce the number of children passing so the academically qualified becomes an elite, filled with people like him who can afford good schools and private tuition if the unqualified teachers provided by the academies aren’t up to scratch.

This is my problem with the Conservative and by extension the Coalition (because-really-what’s-the-fucking-difference) approach to education. It isn’t that they’ve chosen the wrong solution to an evident problem, a la the economy; they’ve invented a problem where none exists.

That isn’t to say that our education system is perfect, it really isn’t, but the problem has always been that there is too much importance given to exams. As I’ve said before, students aren’t taught about the subject, their natural curiosity afire with the drive for knowledge, they are taught how to pass exams. What key points to bring up when discussing those poems you don’t care about to tick the boxes in the checklist the examiner has. Show your working, because that will get you marks, doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing just do this to these numbers and you’ll at least get half marks. Don’t know what cumulative means? Doesn’t matter. Don’t know why algebra is important? Who cares, just get all the Xs on one side and the Ys on the other because that’s what the examiner is looking for.

Ah those magic words, the answer to every schoolboy question.

“Sir, why should we do it this way?”

“Because that’s what the examiner will look for.”

Education shouldn’t be like that, it should be about awakening a desire for more and better knowledge. Channelled curiosity. But according to the Conservatives it is in fact a market, the economy of grades.

Because you see, your knowledge only has value in the light of other people’s ignorance. To the Tories the fact that most people don’t fail suggests that it is impossible to fail, and if there is no failure then success is meaningless.

Actually this is a pretty good window onto Tory thinking.

For being rich to mean anything others must be penniless.

For being well fed to mean anything others must be starving.

For your nice house to mean anything others must be living under bridges [link].

For your voice to matter others must shut up and do what they’re told.

FUCK THAT!

The Great GCSE Slump

So, the proportion of students getting A* to C grades in GCSEs this summer has fallen for the first time in the twenty four years since this systems inception. And people are rather upset by this.

Ok let’s unpack this a bit; how far did the grades fall by? Well not much as it happens, according to the BBC 69.4% gained A* to C grades this year compared with 69.8% in the summer of 2011. A fall of 0.4% is not particularly significant a change, indeed the fact that there has been no fluctuation in the proportion of A* to C grades gained, only constant rise, is cause for concern in and of itself.

But leaving aside the question of grade inflation, the fact that this has caused a stir is interesting in and of itself. The most humanitarian, and constantly touted, grudge is that the exams taken in the summer were graded more harshly than those who took exams in the January of this year, breaking any notion of the GCSEs as means for comparison within a peer group with a sickening crack.

Not helped by this is the over emphasis that is constantly put on grades which, so it is said, are the key to every child’s future; from sixth form to university to your eventual career, results are everything. Not whether you enjoyed yourself, not whether you were enthused by the very act of learning, not even if you came out with more skills and wisdom than you went in. No your success is determined completely by your ability to regurgitate a year or two of repetition and rote learning in an hour and a half.

Exams do not asses how students are taught, students are taught to pass exams, and there is the source of this ‘grade inflation’.

Then into this china shop that is the education system comes the wild-eyed orang-utan Michael Gove. Already the education system has been battered by the rise in tuition fees for universities and horrifically crippled by the introduction of unqualified teachers, now Gove is going for the exams.

I should mention that Gove hasn’t been shown to exert any political pressure on exam boards, nor has anyone yet claimed evidence of him doing so, and frankly I doubt there ever will be. But I am sorry, when I can use my fingers and less than thirty seconds of google’s time to find endless examples of Gove as the shadow secretary for education saying that exams in the past have been “devalued” and that there has been a “deliberate lowering of standards” then this issue is already politicised and anyone can see which way the current establishment is blowing. Gove wants things the way they were, when if you couldn’t learn your Latin or hire a tutor you were out of luck and universities were the preserve of the elite while the rest went up chimneys or down t’pit.

Incidentally Gove himself went to Oxford, like so many others in the present government. Also like those in the present government he is rather well off, with wealth of a million pounds in 2009 according to estimates by the New Statesman. I doubt his children will fail exams no matter how inept they may be, not when extra-curricular tuition is so affordable.

This upset about a fall in exam grades is not motivated solely by compassion for those children who waited till the summer to take their exams (though I wish it were that humanitarian), it is a reaction due entirely to the disproportionate importance placed on these exams by all parties in desperate need of a metric to judge their own misguided policies. In this the real essence has been lost, the process of learning, the heart and soul of the education system, has been replace by the end exam result, a relatively unimportant series of statistics.