Flipping exams
It had to happen. After McJobs, Britain now has McQualifications. The Times splashed today on the fact that
McDonald’s and other big businesses will award their own qualifications equal to GCSEs, A levels and degrees, in subjects such as fast-food restaurant management... McDonald’s will train employees for a certificate in basic shift management, recognised by the QCA as equal to an A-level. [My emphasis] Trainees will learn about the day-to-day running of a restaurant, including finance, hygiene and human resources.Someone once wrote a terrific book in the 1990s about the destruction of Britain’s education system (ok, it was me). It was called All Must Have Prizes (after the Dodo’s ruling, at the end of the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, that ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’) because at the very core of this disaster is the belief that everyone must be a winner and no-one a loser for fear of destroying children’s ‘self-esteem’; and so in order to ensure that everyone achieves equal esteem, academic and vocational qualifications must be given equal status and failure must be written out of the picture altogether. So now we have Mickey Mouse ‘university’ courses, students being awarded degrees when they have scored zero in their exams because they have never even turned up (as was told to me by an academic at that particular university) , standards across the board in both academic and vocational courses plummeting, graduates who can’t string a sentence together, young people who know little and can’t think for themselves, record school truancy rates and social mobility going backwards with fewer pupils from poor backgrounds going to good universities.
Their self-esteem, however, is doubtless top-notch.
But hey, look on the bright side. As the Tories have pointed out, the McLevels may be of a higher standard than the dodgy vocational courses currently on offer. Education? Forget it. It’s all about flipping skills.