Education

Cristina Odone begins her latest oh-woe-is-Britain post most amusingly: Around the world, people have long envied Britain’s two institutions: the BBC and Oxbridge. Britons, however, (or some of them) are determined to destroy both. They are going about it in a brutal and obvious way, by lowering standards for both Auntie and the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The BBC abroad was a byword for beautifully written and brilliantly produced programmes such as “The World at War” and “Upstairs Downstairs”. But in its obsession with “diversity”, the Beeb has allowed standards to slip: comedies that aren’t funny (but don’t sound middle class) and reality shows that teach nothing but

‘If concerns are expressed, we look into them. We’ve done that.’ When Glenys Stacey appeared on Sky News this evening after Ofqual finally published its initial report into the gradings of the GCSE English exams, she had an air of finality about her. What the chief executive of the regulator was trying to suggest, as she discussed the report’s findings with the presenter, was that this was the end of the row. Even though Ofqual’s report said the problem with last week’s GCSE results was not that the papers taken in June had been marked too harshly, but that those sat in January were marked too generously, this is not the

For the first year since GCSE’s came in we have not seen ‘the best results ever’.  Which is, of course, a great relief.  As Anthony Seldon, among others, has pointed out, these results suggest a return to credibility in our examination system. But there are already those, including some teachers and teacher unions who are now hinting darkly at ‘political interference’.  They are used to year-on-year grade inflation and expected this to continue forever. I think these people should themselves be asked to pass a simple test.  They should try to find a single university lecturer who is able to tell them (with a straight face) that each year –

What do you say to an Arts graduate? ‘Big Mac and fries, please!’ I used to laugh at that joke until I was served a Junior Whopper by one of my fellow arts graduates in Edinburgh and ever since then I’ve been suspicious of the story I was sold at school: that going to university takes you into a new league of earning potential. The A-Level results came out yesterday, and anyone who has opened an exams envelope will be familiar with the feeling. That you may as well have the results tattooed on your forehead because they will define the trajectory of your life. But in the 22 years since

This year’s coverage of A-levels has been a little different to that in previous years. Sure, there are still plenty of blonde twins coming out of the woodwork to take impressively high jumps in the air but there are no headlines about results breaking new records for the proportion of top marks awarded, and that’s because tough new rules on the exams came into effect this year. Last year results remained static for the first time in a decade, and this year, they saw a drop. The number of marks at A or above fell 0.4 per cent to 27 per cent of total grades awarded. Just under 7.9 per

The genius of Mo Farah was only underscored by the plodding stupidity of Downing Street’s statements about the “All Must Have Prizes” culture this weekend. If this is the culture which produced Mo Farah then surely we should be celebrating it. But the truth is that it doesn’t exist and never has done. How does David Cameron think we managed to get 28 gold medals if not through the promotion of competitive sport in schools? Mo Farah attended an inner city comprehensive his talent was spotted and encouraged. What’s wrong with that? Considering the scale of the success of London 2012, it’s no surprise that there have been attempts from

A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, who said: ‘The Tory-led Government’s decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.’ It’s easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee

The pace of reform in education has been stepped up again today. The model funding agreement for all new academies has now been changed by the Department for Education to remove the requirement for all teachers to have Qualified Teacher Status. Any existing academy will also be able to change its funding agreement to include this new freedom. This change might sound technical but its importance is that it means that academies will now be able to employ people who have not gone through a year of teacher training. Previously, an academy couldn’t have employed, say, James Dyson to teach design without him having done a year in a teacher

Last night I attended a public meeting to discuss the successful bid by parents in north London to set up a free school in East Finchley. The Archer Academy is to be a non-selective, non-denominational community school. It was an extraordinary occasion, with hundreds of local parents prepared to throw their weight behind the project. Tellingly, a local Labour councillor was on the panel to answer questions about the new school which has cross-party support. This is due, in no small part, to the desperation of the community in the face of consistent refusal on the part of the local authority (Tory-controlled Barnet) to do the right thing and build

The discussion of Britain’s latest tennis nearly man has turned inevitably to the culture of a sport which, in this country at least, remains laughably exclusive. Asked on the Today programme why we fail to produce consistent numbers of good tennis players the tennis evangelist and comedian Tony Hawks (who knows a thing or two about what is laughable) made a good suggestion about opening up our ridiculously expensive (and often empty) courts to the public. But the debate about tennis reveals a deeper malaise. In this country we are prepared to accept mediocrity because the last thing we would dare tamper with is the class system. There is a