How far our schools have fallen

Verity

I have no sympathy for you. You let it happen. You fell for all (or were afraid to speak out against) this communist equality crap ... somalis are just as intelligent and highly developed as Europeans (although we do have to lower the bar so the thick peoples - ooops! disadvantaged peoples blah blah blah ...) The lowest common denominator's the name of the game in today's trashy Britain.

You saw it happen and you tolerated it for 13 years. You allowed yourselves to be bullied as "racists" and snobs for not believing that everyone is born with equal abilities.

Well now the gloves are off and crap countries are beating us. You brought it on yourselves. Tony 'n' Cherie must be so proud.

Now the race industry is complaining because Oxford and Cambridge have refused to lower their admittance standards in the name of "diversity".

We'll see what Cameron's response is. My guess, a full curtsey.

Mike

If more countries have been added, how many of the new ones are ahead of us thus pushing us back anyway?

Nick

Give everyone who wants it a voucher for 5,000 to be used on education for their child.

That saves the state about 1,400 a year (from eyeballing the graph).

Another 1,400 to spend as the state sees fit on the pupils that are left, is clearly a bonus if the spending is good.

dearieme

Yep, the Forces of Progress have committed on the schools the greatest philistine act in British history. Remind me again; why do Artists and People of Culture overwhelmingly support them? It must be the money, I suppose.

Mike

Also, it says in the PISA report-

'Trend comparisons, which are a feature of the PISA 2009 reporting are not reported here because for the United Kingdom it is only possible to compare 2006 and 2009 data. As the PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 samples for the United Kingdom did not meet the PISA response-rate standards, no trend comparisons are possible with these years.'

So you shouldn't be comparing 2000 with 2009, they said. You can only compare 2006 and 2009, and when we've only dropped 4 places after having new countries introduced it isn't at all bad, especially since the margins of error overlap quite a bit.

In fact, the whole thing seems to directly contradict what you're trying to pretend it's saying. It says we're average, but highly unequal- saying it is socio-economic inequality that is behind the inequality of achievement.

'More strikingly, 77% of the between schools differences in student performance in the United Kingdom is explained by differences in socio-economic background.'

'The share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in the United Kingdom is well below average.'

The gist of the report is basically that the UK is very unequal, and that a decent level of funding, rather than being a cause of our in many ways poor performance, mitigates the effects of the real cause of our sheer mediocrity- social inequality.

lids

This really isn't rocket science. Just copy the independent sector, problem solved..

Instead we have Gove ploughing his own furrow and more confusion in the state sector. Selection, build lots of grammar schools, provide alternative vocational training for those who will never be academic and play a lot more team sports. Oh no, Cameron has already hammered the sports budget and doesn't like grammar schools, even though he went to an exclusive public school himself. The Tories will inevitably fail to improve social mobility, grammar schools provide that automatically....

Ed P

Err, 27th or 28th in Maths?
But surely all that funding under NuLab must have achieved some improvements? Hello, hello, you at the back - what's that? Shiny new desks? Is that all?

Mike

I'd hope this isn't going to end up published, it's completely misleading. Making a graph comparing data that the report itself explicitly says cannot be compared and not actually addressing the real reasons identified as the cause of Britain's lacklustre performance compared to the higher achieving more equal industrialized nations. Attempting to say that the rankings are comparable despite the inclusion of more countries. Britain would be first if it was only Britain, it would be second if it was Britain and Sweden. By the logic of this post Britain has declined without changing a thing just through the inclusion of more countries in the data. That isn't honest.

Read the report about the UK- http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/8/46624007.pdf

Ben WELLS

The fact that you are intending to publish the graph in the magazine shows, sadly, that your performance in Maths is also slipping.

The graph has 2 very substantial flaws:

First, it compares an absolute increase in spending with a relative decline in PISA attainment: in absloute terms, it may be that our scores on which PISA is based have increased, but at a lesser rate than that of other countries.

Second, your choice of scales is arbitrary, so makes it appear we have slipped from the top to the bottom. PISA covers 65 nations, whereas your graph implies that there ought be about 30.

I am a Maths teacher, and generally agree that standards have declined (largely because toothless regulation has allowed exam boards to bid down standards in order to "win" candidates). However, statistical illiteracy of the sort demonstrated by your graph does not help the cause of improving standards.

C- for this bit of work!

Robert

IQ tests show that scores for the average British 14-year-old have dropped by more than two points between 1980 and 2008. For those in the upper half of the intelligence scale - a group typically dominated by the children of middle-class families - average IQ scores were six points down on 28 years ago.

Foundavoice

I wrote about this scandal today:

http://foundavoice.blogspot.com/2010/12/emigration-school-standards.html

It's one of the reasons that I'm emigrating.

David Ossitt

James Forsyth writes,

‘Leaving aside all the arguments about whether or not these exams are getting easier, it doesn’t much matter if children today are doing better academically than their peers a generation ago.’

It doesn’t much matter?

Oh yes it does, it matters in so very many ways.

It matters because we have pupils gaining high grades in exams who barely have any understanding of their subject, thus making the grades they receive nonsensical.

We have pretend exams with multi-choice answers that only a cretin could fail at, and yet many gain Cs, Ds, Es, or worse.

We see young men and women leaving school, going on to further education and then teacher training colleges, who when they then take up a teaching post, can not write out end of term reports without spelling and grammatical errors from start to finish.

We see all labour politicians and to their great shame many so-called Tories side with the Marxist, Trotskyite teachers unions in condemning all and any schooling system based on ability. (Grammar Schools)

We see a downward spiral in education, where thousands of children are cheated in that they leave school barely literate, with little, if any knowledge of our history.

So yes, it matters, children in the forties, and fifties left school at fifteen, with a much wider basic education that equipped them to find their way in the world.

Today the children are being robbed, they are being cheated, they are being lied to and mislead.

james

As Verity says, we're importing kids from the lowest IQ countries & paying the least intelligent to breed - garbage in, garbage out.

Rosie

@ David Ossitt - Hear hear and hear again!

Simon Stephenson

Mike : 6.54pm

According to my calculations, of the 27 countries which took part both in 2000 and 2010, the UK has fallen from 7th to 18th in reading, 8th to 18th in maths, and 4th to 9th in science.

This is on the assumption that the same 27 countries that took part in the 2000 reading test were also the only countries that also took part in the 2000 maths and science tests. I haven't been able to verify this, but I think it's pretty likely to be true.

JohnPage

1. Why were the levels of response in 2000 & 2003 inadequate?

2. Can't we go back beyond 2000?

Verity

You let it happen because you feared being called a racist by the Blair gestapo.

(A fear, I concede, which was justifiable. Some of us intuited what was coming down the tracks and got out ahead of time.)

Simon Stephenson

Robert : 7.39pm

"For those in the upper half of the intelligence scale - a group typically dominated by the children of middle-class families"

Do you have evidence to support this claim of differential IQ expectation by social class?

Simon Stephenson

I read "Today's PISA rankings" in the post above, and assumed the data related to 2010. I see now that it was actually collected in 2009, so the 2010 in my post should read 2009.

Sorry.

salieri

On the subject of English, James, you mean compared WITH, not compared to. To compare to means to liken ('shall I compare thee to a summer's day?') whereas to compare with means to contrast. Thousands of children are brought up by uneducated teachers not to know, or to recognise, the difference, hence to beggar the richness of their language. Do set them a better example, please.

Andy Leeds

Verity is basically right: we have allowed this to happen. The reality is there will be no improvements in Education until and unless the power of the Educational Establishment and the Teaching Unions is destroyed once and for all. Freeing ALL schools from state control is a way forward, but so are educational vouchers. Give parents a voucher worth £x and allow them to spend that voucher as they see fit, be it in a Private School or a former State School. The competition thus created will have a remarkable effect on standards.

Edward McLaughlin

Surely, any full acceptance of the globalist scheme, would insist that we regard the pupils who happen to be educated in the UK, with no special affinity - they are pupils just the same as those educated in Japan, Peru...anywhere.

yank

Argue over the outcomes all you want, but the inputs in that graph show that you've increased spending over 50% in 10 years. Somebody should be sent to the Tower, because I highly doubt you're getting a return on that scandalous cost increase.

And I highly doubt Dave will be taking on the drivers of that cost increase. That would require determined leadership, of which he's void. More hand waving and misdirection here, I should think.

A conservative publication would spend considerable time and effort discretely identifying the problem, first, before leaping into some MP hacks' alleged "reforms".

You've skipped the first step, and it's a necessary one, if you ever want to build public opinion towards a solution. You all should really stop insulting the Public with approaches such as this.

Rhoda Klapp

Who came 1st? What do they do?

General Zod

The word is "admission", Verity, not "admittance". Oxford and Cambridge admit plenty of non-caucasians, but they are high fee-paying Asians. The universities are chasing money and British candidates suffer, both from state schools (with their higher proportions of minorities) and from private schools.

The cynical debasement of the A Level by Labour has worked against pupils from private schools, with absurd numbers achieving top grades in at least three, very often four and not infrequently five A Levels. When I got my offer from Cambridge in the mid-1980s (for law), it was ABB, considered a high offer. Few achieved three A grades in those days. Even a C was not a very bad result - some of my Cambridge contemporaries had a C grade in one of their A levels. The grading system of the 1980s would have allowed more room for Dons to give a leg-up to a bright state school pupil with grades one level below those of a similarly bright private school pupil. Now, when all get As, apart from the thick, that opportunity is lost, as the grades are meaningless. The universities too have devalued their grading, with few 2:2s being awarded and almost no thirds. In my day, 20-30% got 2:2s and most ended up with good jobs. Now I interview graduates with five top grade A levels and a 2:1 who cannot articulate an argument and who are unable to venture a remotely interesting view of the world.

This survey exposes yet again the hypocrisy of Labour and Blair who declared that his government's priority would be "education, education, education."

Dimoto

The number of equivocators on here, trying to argue the toss, or deconstruct the graphic, indicates the massive inertia and denial of even supposedly educated people.

How many people in this country even realise what is going on ?
It really does make me want to emigrate - again.

Fergus Pickering

General Zod, you speak truth, oh wise one. When I was at university in the 1960s the rough breakdown was this: 1st class 10%, 2:1 20%. 2:2 30%, 3rd 25%, Pass, Fail, General dross, 15%. The easiest way to get a First was to study Social Science or Oxford P.P.E. Since then the whole graph has shifted violently leftward. Now it is something like: 1st 20%, 2:1 65%, 2:2 10%, Dross 5%. And of course, since a far greater proportion of the young go to uni, the general standard of intelligence is far lower. I am not JUDGING this. I am simply saying it is so. Many students do not know this, and worry unduly about failing or getting a third class degree: both outcomes are exceedingly unlikely. Priobablyb he best thging to do now is to abolish all classes except the First and Standard. Give firsts to the top 10% in each year. Give everybody else who actually makes it to the Examination Hall and completes a paper a Standard Class degree. Of course this does not address the huge difference in value between a degree from Oxford and a degree from, the University of Middle England, but I can see you cannot do this. It wouldn't be FAIR, just as it isn't fair that an Eton education is so much better than what you get at Bogstandard Comprehensive.

Sir Everard Digby

As Keynes once said:
'Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent'

Chris lancashire

We look forward to the views of the then New Labour Minister of Education on these statistics.

Ivan D

Shush Mike, stop with your facts. Forsyth has been given some stuff to spin by Gove, so he's got a job to do. It's a pity someone doesn't have the job of being the Speccie's political editor to do.

john

You seem to assume that no-one involved in Scottish education reads your magazine.

Should that surprise me?

Steve Albury

In a meta-analysis of GCE results in England and Wales between 1968 and 1973 "a clear and consistent decline in standards is apparent" was one of the findings - most of the quantitative work done on standards is very dubious and if anybody really thinks Chinese students are cleverer than say US students they haven't worked with them on applied tasks or in situations where metacognitive and creative activity are required. British education suffers because the system is muddled, the goalposts keep moving and teachers are blamed for every failure of government policy and meddling - even Gove doesn't really believe in setting schools free.

TomTom

I am sceptical about PISA knowing about the guy behind it, his father and his wife. However, it is fascinating that in Germany baden-Wuerttemberg and Bayern are TOP and they have selective education.....the states with comprehensives in Germany are BOTTOM.

Then again we have fine selective schools in England - you simply have to pay for them. Until Eton is forced to provide 25% places to Scholarship boys as a Direct Grant Grammar School we shall get nowhere.

How many children get Free School Meals at your old school Nick Clegg ? What proportion of the pupils at your old school get to top universities ?

There you are Nick...no correlation...it is a negative correlation

TomTom

"The easiest way to get a First was to study Social Science or Oxford P.P.E"

Not true. PPE had 8% Firsts but English 15%.

40% PPE students at Oxford today are NOT British

Pedantic Virgo

"They are yet enough (sic) reminder of how crucial Michael Gove’s education reforms are to this country’s future prospects" Ah, education, education, education - or is it proof reading or a spell checker?

Roger Davies

Privatise education, removal political interference, close down subsidised Teachers Training Colleges and encourage merit through endeavour. Simples. Within a generation we will be once again in the top echelon.

Fergus Pickering

No, Tom Tom. The year I graduated English had 10% and PPE 15%. That would be 1966. But what the hell? The point is a minor one. English has gone down the pan everywhere since then. PPE? I dunno.

Noa

Rhoda

The answers?

China (by an incredibly high margin), and what they do includes;
Working hard.
An intense examination system.
The de facto application of grammar achool standards to everyone.
In contrast to the general lowering of standards we go for.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8187967/Shanghai-students-ranked-best-in-the-world-at-maths-and-science.html

lescam

In 1955 I sat my 'O' levels, the equivalent of today's GCSE.

In maths, I studied algebra, trigonometry, differential calculus and integral calculus. In science I did physics, chemistry and biology. In English I studied Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

In no way are today's standards comparable. Of course, I was fortunate enough to be at a grammar school. These are practically non-existent now. We have all dumbed down to the level of the moronic.

Wily Trout

The education establishment including teaching unions and Local Authorities, and I think the universities, are just sitting there with eyes closed and fingers in ears waiting for Labour to get back in at the next election. Our LA is still working to the requirements of the previous government.
On the other hand, schools in the area are rushing to Acacdemy conversion to free themselves of the tentacles of the Local Authority. The only response LAs give heads is, 'if you go to Academy status that will cost 3 or 4 jobs at County Hall'. That's where they're coming from. Always.

Duke_Nukem

Funny that Wales is the worst-performing UK nation, yet their plans to shield indigenous students from increased tuition fees depend on English students studying in their universities and paying the full whack.

Can't see it happening on this showing...

TGF UKIP

Just caught the last ten minutes or so of Dave at a forum on tuition fees etc in which Clevinger chimed in to make clear that universities are still going to be judged for their funding by this nudging, nannying, bossy governemnt on social engineering criteria.

New Labour is till alive and kicking and has seamlessly morphed into Blue Labour.