When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you.
Easy though GCSEs have become, it transpires that for government propaganda purposes they are still not easy enough. The government’s much-trumpeted claims about turning around low-performing schools are based not so much upon improved GCSE results as on a switch to a much lesser-known qualification called General National Vocational Qualification, or GNVQ.
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