The grade inflation scam

John Montague

Very interesting. Good for the OECD

On the last point, it's worth mentioning that it's probably more difficult to get into Westminster in the first place than it is to get into Oxford, in the sense that it's more oversubscribed, never mind the fees.

The number of applicants (with eager to pay parents) per available place is higher than for an Oxford college.

Schools like Westminster, St Paul's, etc apply such rigid selection that it would be a crime if they did not secure a significant number of Oxbridge places. The pity is that there are not many more such schools in the market, available to those who cannot afford the public schools' socially divisive fees.

Cynic

The problem with Blair's mantra of Education x 3 is that it was only ever a soundbite. You can't have the plebs being well educated (as they used to be under the old Grammar School system) - they probably wouldn't vote Labour.

Pete-s

What happened every time this was alleged in Parliament. Deny; deny; deny. Ed Balls was the most outspoken defender of the improvements. Oh sorry, biggest liar I forgot.

TrevorsDen

But fundamentally clever and/ or motivated people are the ones who go to Westminster School - so what is the value of this statistic?

The other stats are a savage indictment of the failure of Labour and their destructive effect on British Society.
All 'good men and true' should keep them out of power.

HJ

This was a good article - until the last paragraph.

Westminster School is a HIGHLY selective school, so comparisons with the general run of schools tells us very little. Neither is going to Oxford or Cambridge necessarily proportionately indicative of academic merit or achievement. I think that it is true to say that state school pupils with similar grades to Westminster School pupils are less likely to apply to Oxford or Cambridge - and, in my opinion, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Do we really think that it would be a good idea to cram the most academic into just two universities? That it doesn't happen is no bad thing - talent should be spread amongst a greater number of universities.

I say this as a Durham graduate who refused to apply to Cambridge (as my teacher wanted me to) after I visited with him and discovered that they let in students with poor 'A' level results from independent schools with which they had a traditional quota every year. I'm sure that this no longer happens, but it is indicative of the fact that there has not necessarily been a correlation between academic ability and Oxbridge entry.

Perry

Everything about the reign of CMD's hero and his sidekick was a fiddle or a fabrication : the economic figures, the exam results - you name it, they bent it.

And CMD is still enthralled?

GHU!

daniel maris

1. It's highly patronising towards people from poor single parent families inner city council estates to suggest you know better than them what their university choice should be. It's hardly a disaster for them personally if they choose a university where they will meet people who understand their background rather than people who have been to the opera and have a trust fund.

2. The free school movement will do nothing to improve standards, although it will save a lot of upper middle class parents in London the vast expense of private education and allow them to have larger families and/or buy bigger houses (or at least do their bit for house price inflation).

3. If we were serious about raising standards (and I doubt many people really are that serious) I think we should consider creating weekday boarding schools within our inner cities, so that the young people can have some structure in their lives, have a proper nutritious diet and have supervised homework sessions. Reduce the amount of teaching time, reduce class sizes and increase personal tuition.

4. We should really by now be harnessing computer gaming for educative processes. Too little has been in that direction.

escapedRoger

Yes, a well managed school can turn round in a couple of years, but only with very hard work by the teachers, unrelenting focus on teaching and learning: all the techniques are known. The question is;are there enough teachers of the right quality in the public sector. Many couldn't cope as its a ten hour a day vocation (think of it as a job and you lose straight away).

Fergus Pickering

I've said thia before and now I'll say it again. I went to Oxford in 1964. In those days there were closed scholarships at colleges for certain public schools. But i was also open to the colleges to let in whoever they liked and they used this freedom to take applicants from state schools with poorer A levels or Scottish Highers if they thought they showed promise. That is how I got in. My Highers were not exceptional. Nowadays I wouldn't be admitted. Were they right. I think they were. I wasn't a high-flying first but I was better than my friend from North London with straight As in his A levels and better than many a public school boy there. I was somewhere in the top fifteen per cent, which means, if it matters, that I would be a first class student nowadays. I would never have applied and my school was not particularly supportive. It was a particular teacher who had recently spent two years at Balliol ona schoolmaster studentship who pushed me, who MADE me do it. Is this just vulgar boasting? No of course it isn't. You university degree and indeed your university is quickly of no interest to anybody once you are embarked on your career. Banging on about it is like joining MENSA, a sad affair. Nevertheless, since my experience was very ordinary it may be illustrative. About 50% of Oxford undergraduates came from state schools, in 1964, most, though not all, of them from grammar schools.

Remittance Man

So Tony and Grodon spent ten years wasting your money and they hid it from you by fiddling the books.

How, in the name of all that is holy is that "news".

What would be news would be if the British people (that's you guys) actually did something about it.

Sadly sitting back and watching the next bunch of corrupt cretins repeat the entire process seems to be the extent of your reaction.

Remittance Man

Mr Montague,

I fear you make a huge mistake in focusing on money. Yes Westminster and St Pauls produce good results, but so do many schools that don't charge their pupils' parents a large fortune to educate them*.

One factor that does matter at least as much as money is the commitment of the school to excellence, but even that pales into insignificance compared to one thing nobody seems to have identified.

St Pauls, Westminster, Eton and all the rest really do well because they don't have to follow the dictates of a bunch of moronic politicians and their chippy advisors.

The reason for their success? It's all in the description - INDEPENDENCE

*Of course independence does have one financial advantage as well - Independent schools don't see 30% of the money available to them swallowed up paying for the layers of bureaucracy HMG seems to think necessary for teaching kids to read and write.

Mark M

Look at that bar for 15 year olds. What an utter disgrace. How can the last government have been so cynical as to have sent these children off into the wide world telling them that they've done brilliantly, while knowing that all the improvement in scores is grade inflation?

Whatever their faults, I always at least believed those Labour MPs were at least decent humans. Clearly I was naive. No decent person could treat the hopes and dreams of millions of children as a statistical plaything, to be manipulated for partisan reasons. It makes me sick.

Andy Leeds

Well said Remittance Man. Would that our children left school able to read and write. Too many don't seem to be able to do either. Gove has got the right ideas and he needs to push them through at some speed. We need to destroy the power of the teaching unions and the LEAs. Put parents in charge and that will drive up standards which have been so debased over the last 20 years.

Janee

The problem with the article is that it does exactly what Blair did - select which bits it wants to report in order to support the writer's preconceived ideas. Harris has not made staggering progress. The Harris Academy at Peckham opened in 2003, has exam results below the 35% and less than 70% make the expected progress in English and Maths. Other academies have apparently improved exam results by using "easy" exams, restricted curricula, etc.

Competition between schools does not encourage improved education. It encourages, amongst some head teachers, a cynical approach to the choice of curriculum. It encourages focussing on those students who will count in the statistics. It encourages forcing children in making choices which will enhance the school's position in the league tables, rather than what is in the student's best interests.

Surely the point about the international comparisons is precisely that greater diversity in school governance does not work. After all, Sweden and the US have also not shown up well in the same tests - but that must be ignored, mustn't it because that doesn't fit the argument.

I suggest that, if you want to make sensible comments, you check out the curriculum offer of schools and also get the full exam results which are available from the DfE in January each year. These figures give, for example, free school meals, absence, value added.

HJ

Janee:

"Competition between schools does not encourage improved education. It encourages, amongst some head teachers, a cynical approach to the choice of curriculum. It encourages focussing on those students who will count in the statistics. It encourages forcing children in making choices which will enhance the school's position in the league tables, rather than what is in the student's best interests."

NO. We don't currently have competition between schools - we have centrally enforced targets and that is what leads to the cynical behaviour you describe. You will notice that the issues you describe affect only the state sector - not the independent sector where pupils and parents have a choice of school.

John Montague

@remittance man

"St Paul's, Westminster, Eton and all the rest really do well because they don't have to follow the dictates of a bunch of moronic politicians and their chippy advisors."

I'm afraid that to a considerable extent, there's no escape, even at those schools. I've even heard stories of classrooms switching to whatever is the currently fashionable teaching method, just for the day of the inspection, with the children gleefully entering into this deception for the benefit of a popular teacher.

What these schools have (although certainly not 'all the rest' - many expensive public schools are poor) is first of all children who have effectively passed an IQ test, usually at 7 or 8 to get into an appropriate prep school, a test that puts them in the top 5 percentile for the ability to pass such tests, lets say, to be uncontentious.

Then they have teachers with the talent to enthuse their class, a talent that they can exercise because discipline prevails. However, even at these schools, if the head has hired a duffer, he's stuck with him. Incompetent teachers are practically unsackable unless they offend in some other way.

Finally the schools have extended school hours and children whose home backgrounds is cultured, usually numerate, and in most but far from all cases, supportive.

Daniel Maris makes some good points. His boarding-schools sound like an option worth trying. Personally , I'd also like to see at least some of Gove's new schools be granted both the right to be selective, using just a basic culture-free IQ test, and complete discretion about exclusion for disruptive behaviour.

RocketDog

James Montague
Apropos your last sentence. There used to be. They were called grammar schools. Some of the independent ones that are still around are amongst the best schools in the country

If you can't afford Westminster for your kids or get them into a grammar or a 'faux' grammar/comp you are left shopping at an educational Tesco with Janee and her friends. I am surprised that there isn't a DofE comparison shopping site for schools. Amongst selection criterian that may well be missing of course would be that old fashioned thing that we used to call 'ethos'

Great teachers make great schools, not bureaucrats and certainly not politicians. They make them possible if you can't afford Westminster

TomTom

"Great teachers make great schools"

but they cannot fight the catchment area. That is why you need to isolate the school from the catchment by selection

Andy Carpark

A Korean friend recently explained to me how her high school class finessed their English. First, they were divided into six syndicates, each of which elected a captain. At the beginning of each week, everyone would hand to their captain a list of ten English sentences which they then undertook to learn, an acceptable level of difficulty being a matter of tacit consensus but arbitrated by the class teacher if necessary. At the end of the week the students would file past the captain and recite their ten sentences for her to tick off (or not) on a clipboard. Team scores would in due course be published.

Lethally effective, but would of course never make it past the self-esteem industry over here.

cityboozer

Fergus,

My experience of Oxford admissions was very much the same, only 31 years later - OK but unexceptional highers from a school which sent dozens annually to each of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and elsewhere but was a little scared of Oxbridge.

My experience as a student was a little different though as, being a lazy bugger I did ok on the actual learning front but failed to achieve better than a lower second.

JohnPage

My experience at '60s Oxford mirrored Fergus's. State school pupils seemed to blossom more than those from public school. The college was looking for promise rather than grades achieved.

Abraccio

Statistics, eh? Rather then offering sonme fresh insight you are about the ninety ninth person to trot out the corny cliche about Westminster and FSM, an uttrely meaningless comparison. I refer to you to the Oxford University website which has an article that actually demonstrates that statistically its intake of FSM students is comparatively high.

Likewise let us see what the story behind the ARK stats is - too often these stats hide the fact as other correspondents suggest that they have simply "downgraded" the level of exams taken.

I'm all for open access and social mobility but let's start basing discussion on the real world and not simply on who can better manipulate statistics. stsctsoics bettere

Cynic

@daniel maris "1. It's highly patronising towards people from poor single parent families inner city council estates to suggest you know better than them what their university choice should be. It's hardly a disaster for them personally if they choose a university where they will meet people who understand their background rather than people who have been to the opera and have a trust fund." That sounds patronising in itself - G*d forbid that they should have their horizons broadened and mix with people from a different social milieu. They might discover that there's a whole world out there that they could, by dint of hard work, enjoy and become part of.

Cogito Ergosum

It is time to assess schools performance on the basis of the IQ of their children, not whether they qualify for free school meals. It is also time the national curriculum introduced targets that take account of IQ.

If a child of IQ 115 (about one sixth of children meet or exceed this) scores only the result for IQ 100, then something has failed: the child, the school, the education system, or any or all of these. Equally it is futile to expect a child of IQ 85 to meet the 100 score.

This would sort out the schools which are doing well with their actual intake, as against the others.

Mike Stallard

My College at Cambridge is falling over itself to encourage Comprehensive pupils to try for entry. To that end, a rep has been appointed for Cambridgeshire to go out (free) to every Comprehensive in the county to put the case.
Out of duty, I wrote to two local Heads to say this.
Guess what? Not even one bothered to reply.

At the time I was coaching a lad and when I asked him if he had looked at any universities he told me he had. "We went to Cambridge and looked there but it wasn't much good." I was appalled and asked him which College he had seen.
"I think it was called Anglia Ruskin".

Wally Watkins

Poor old Britain, still blaming all save itself: there is a structural problem in UK education. Please look at the Pisa data http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf
Here in Canada all schools are comprehensive
save for the private schools. Finland also has an effective inclusive comprehensive system.
The class war rages, and the 'egotistical calculation" of such as Gove will ensure increased social pain, more rapid economic degeneration. The rich hate the poor.
So sad.
`Redbrick 1952`

Rick

Of course it was a con. Just look at the grade boundaries - 29% for a 'C' at GCSE? beyond laughable, it's very sad. I put up with for as long as I could still teach the subject as well as how to pass the Government-dictated exams. I emigrated 3 years ago.. and thus you lose my taxes as well as my abilities. B&B have screwed up the UK for a long time.