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Sunday 8 November 2009

A levelling down, again

The impulse driving the latest changes proposed for 18+ school examinations is the same impulse that has progressively brought the entire UK education system to its knees over these past thirty years and more. It is, at root, the view that if everyone can’t achieve high academic status, then high academic status must be abolished.

The new system sets out to abolish A-level by stealth. A-level is considered the ‘gold standard’ of the education system. The gatekeeper to university entrance, in the past it ensured the most efficient and effective higher education system in the world, since the depth and focus of its examination ensured high quality entrants and a very low drop-out rate.

Over the years, however, as the entire education system imploded, it has been progressively undermined. One of the factors contributing to this ratcheting of standards ever downwards was what happened to the 16+ examination, a forerunner of the current A-level proposals. In a well-meaning but misguided attempt to do something about the ‘under-performing 40 per cent tail’ of children leaving school at 16 with no qualifications, the ‘vocational’ CSE was introduced alongside the academic O-level. Lo and behold, in due course it was decided that this was no good because the CSE was considered inferior to O level. So the two were merged into the GCSE — the exam for all talents that everyone would pass. Forced to play to the lowest common denominator, the GCSE inevitably turned into a worthless qualification.

This in turn pulled down the standard of A-level, whose fate was sealed when the government signed up to the belief that, in order to stamp out any danger that anyone might feel inferior to anyone else, all must have prizes and everyone should have a degree. Pushing unsuitable people into higher education meant standards inevitably fell. To mask this, A-level standards were massaged downwards. As A-level got ever easier to pass, it became ever more meaningless.

Meanwhile nothing was done to address the single most conspicuous failure of the education system since World War Two — the absence of high quality vocational training. All attempts to provide this were marred by the fact that the standard of these courses was rubbish. Instead of making them rigorous, the education establishment set out to remove the benchmark of excellence that stood as a reproach to the entire system, A-level. The problem was identified not for what it actually was, the ideology of ‘identical outcomes’ which had hollowed out the understanding of education and knowledge itself and turned excellence into a dirty word, but instead the fact that vocational qualifications were considered inferior to academic qualifications. The remedy for this was to abolish A-level altogether.

When this was first proposed in 2004 by the Tomlinson report along with the phased replacement of GCSE (as also too academic, God help us), the then PM Tony Blair, mindful of the likely outcry, refused to take this fateful step. Now the aptly named Ed Balls, Secretary for Schools Children and Families, proposes a system which is designed to undermine and destroy the A-level and replace it by a diploma which, in purporting to combine academic and vocational within one qualification, will without a shred of doubt be totally worthless.

The outcome is likely to be a still further narrowing of opportunity for the most disadvantaged pupils. Independent schools will increasingly bypass the UK examination system altogether and set the International Baccalaureate instead, and more and more gifted pupils will choose to study at universities abroad. State schools meanwhile will offer their pupils an increasingly worthless qualification, thus ensuring the stunting of their life chances and destroying what remains of Britain’s once inspirational meritocracy.

It is not accident that the word’ education’ has now totally vanished from the title of the department of state that is supposed to be in charge of its provision to the nation. In the grip of the spiteful and nihilistic doctrine that has become the orthodoxy in the education establishment and on the left, it is now set upon finishing the task of wrecking what was once the finest education system in the world.

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