It’s all about ‘education, education, education’ a famous politician once said. Given the mess we’re now in it’s hard to say whether he was right –
perhaps those he educated (x3) have yet to take centre stage and revitalise the economy. In which case I hope they get a move on.
In politics it seems that it is hard to take a long term
view, this may be due to the temporary nature of Government and the belief that
the impact has to be achieved within one term or a second becomes unlikely. It
is clear that Govt. depts. think like this and cabinet ministers more so. Their
next appointment rests on having been seen to achieve something – often
different to actually achieving anything.
There can be few other reasons for the attention that education
ministers past and present give to the issue of examinations and marking
systems. They clearly think that this is something we all understand and that
by trying to have an impact upon it they can garner our support.
As ever what is less clear to the untrained eye is whether
the tinkering really makes any difference. Education has clearly improved and
the school system appears to be producing children with more qualifications at
higher grades. Apparently this isn’t good enough and fails to produce the right
type of ‘graduate’ – or so the current incumbent in the ministry would have us believe.
Does replacing A-D with 1-8 really make any difference? I
don’t believe so. Does the process of swapping a part-coursework based
curriculum with an all-in exam really reflect what happens in the workplace? I
suspect it’s the opposite – most of my experience in the workplace suggests you
work on projects with varying deadlines and that coursework is more reflective
of that. I knew a few kids in my school that could coast through the final two
years because they were good at ‘cramming’ for exams. Does that make them
better employees than someone who is studious over a long period but poor at
exams?
If Gove were presenting this policy as an exam answer he’d
be required to show his ‘workings-out’, where is the statistical evidence that
employers, parents or educators want these changes?
Taking a simplistic view on this I believe that what
employers actually need is consistency, an understanding of the grading system
and how it compares with past and present. It shouldn't be difficult to achieve
this if things were a bit clearer – is an A grade reflective of the top 20% of
students who sat that exam? If so it’s not relevant for it to be changed to a
numeric grade, it makes no difference.
What is important is that it is possible for an employer to
look at the school grades of someone in their 20s and be able to rationally
compare them with the exams and grades of someone in their 30s or 40s –
wherever they’re from in the UK
or elsewhere.
If it isn’t then the qualifications are invalid and it all reverts to basics –
experience, appearance and other standard aspects.
With an apparently vast number of applicants for every
available job it seems to me that employers look for CVs and letters that answer
the brief of the job advert/specifications after first routinely rejecting ones
with basic errors like spelling, grammar, untidiness.
Is it the content that’s more relevant than the
qualification? I couldn’t help that notice my daughter’s maths exam today
contains a lot of stuff that I also part-learned and never used once I stepped
out of education. Perhaps it should be less about pi and Pythagoras and more
about ROI, AER, P/E ratio and the like, things that may be relevant to more
people in modern life? That would seem to be part of a natural evolution which
probably already takes place but doesn’t need a change in the overall
structure.
This is Gove’s second (or third?) attempt to fix something that isn't broken. The less charitable
among us might think that it has more to do with his legacy than that of
future generations, something that he can point at on his CV when the leader’s
job becomes vacant. He went to Oxford
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