Hey! Gove! Leave them kids alone!

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GCSEs aren’t easy. There. I’ve said it. Every year they are mocked, the achievements of young people are derided and their sneering elders in the British establishment tell them “It’s not like the old days” and long for the halcyon days of “O levels” – which are, of course – completely coincidentally – the qualifications received by the aforementioned British establishment.

Yet whilst most people accept such gripes as the inevitable carping of middle aged bores reflecting on the passing of their youth, Michael Gove has taken the remarkable step of turning this into policy, by bringing back O’levels. The Daily Mail today describes GCSEs as “dumbed down” and O’levels as “rigorous”. What young people did “bad” what older people did “good”. Geddit?

Onwards friends to the future. Onwards to the education system of the 1970s!

And how do I know that GCSEs aren’t “easy”? Because unlike most people pontificating on them today I’ve actually had to take them, and I didn’t do spectacularly well. Not badly – a smattering of A’s B’s and a C – but none of the A* grades that are supposedly now de rigeur. A levels I found much easier. Ditto university exams. Because while A levels can be passed with a mixture of confidence, bluster and bravado, for GCSEs you actually have to work quite hard, learn things and master a vast range of information from a broad range of topics.

GCSEs aren’t easy. They require knowledge and hard work. They don’t reward smart arsed shirkers (as I found out to my cost). They aren’t perfect (my god they aren’t perfect) but they achieve much of what Michael Gove purports to want from an education system – assimilation of data, lots of reading, breadth in the curriculum – which you’d never know from the persistent war waged against them in the media.

What was far more damaging to my education than GCSEs however, was the constant tinkering with the curriculum, exam types, qualification standards and the like. The constant chopping and changing – no doubt done for good reasons,meantime pain in the arse for students and teachers alike – meant considerable disruption and confusion
inevitably ensued. The Labour Party spent years trying to make the education system better. In many ways it did. But often the tinkering was unhelpful and counter-productive. Rather than learning this lesson Gove has decided to go for another big bang change in secondary education – the last thing the sector needs.

And of course the irony is that curricula can only do so much. Good teachers matter far more than good exam formats. The subjects at which I did well at school were the ones with good teachers, not fantastic exam papers. And yet there seems no real concerted effort to encourage more people into teaching, and the rewards for being a teacher (with
wages frozen and pension contributions hiked) diminish by the year – driving many good teachers out of the profession.

That’s a far greater threat to the education system.

But Michael Gove doesn’t care about all that. He has taken a whimsical idea and ran with it – to the detriment of young people across the country. What we can expect is effectively the rebranding of GCSEs as “O levels” to make smug ageing middle class establishment politicians feel better about themselves. Meanwhile, with the introduction of CSEs and the capping of attainment for those at the bottom, the poorest students are most likely to suffer – as Chris Cook has expertly pointed out.

The priorities are all wrong. The fetishisation of Latin and the past over the needs of modern Britain and the stability of the education system. As they say in French “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – although I only have a GCSE in it, so perhaps that doesn’t count…

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