This year’s General Certificate of Secondary Education results are out and they’ve got worse for the first time in twenty four years. The percentage of students who got the top grades was down from 69.8% to 69.4%. That’s bad news! Standards are no longer improving, fewer students are achieving better results and the quality of education can no longer be said to be rising.
No, it’s great news. Exams were getting easier, there is too much focus on achieving examination qualifications anyway and it was getting harder and harder to differentiate between the highest achievers and the less able.
No, it can’t be. It must be bad news. Schools have been working hard to raise educational attainment, indeed some schools have been threatened with special measures if they don’t increase the overall percentage of students getting top grades. Today’s results are going to increase the pressure on the teachers and pupils who are caught up in this on-going battle. More young people are destined to be marked down as an academic failure.
Ignore that, it’s definitely good news. Finally the examination boards have got their acts together and are setting questions that tax the ability of the students. Universities will be happier and employers will be happier because they know now that the best really are the best.
Look, it’s bad news, not that the pass rate for GCSEs is going down or up but the fact that the country is obsessed with using a single set of results to achieve multiple aims: to measure student’s academic ability, measure the effectiveness of schools, measure the quality of the examining boards and to allow students to be differentiated for future employment or further education. There are probably many more things it is being used for. The information is far too raw to have any meaning at all and a drop of 0.4% points cannot be taken as a meaningful change, we’re making a dinosaur out of a toe bone. Instead, let’s just congratulate the students and celebrate their success and wish them the best of luck in whatever it is that they would like to do with their lives.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 