Academic masochism or just showing off?

By Grace Fletcher-Hackwood / @msgracefh

This time of year always makes me feel like I should be getting on the bus in the early morning drizzle, with a pot of chocolate pudding in my satchel for breaktime…well, I still do those things. What I’m getting at is that it’s beginning to look a lot like Back To School time, because it is.

At this time of year back at various unspecified point in the 90s, I would have spent much of the day writing down my new timetable – all of which got a lot more enjoyable in Year 10 when I was able to pick which subjects I wanted to carry on with – and even better, which I wanted rid of. Take PE to GCSE level? I’d rather nail my legs to the desk. Music? So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. Art? My response sort of rhymes with ‘Van Gogh’.

Apart from that, however, I didn’t get a lot of choice. My school was both a grammar school and a language college, and their own rules on top of the national curriculum meant the whole thing was rather prescriptive: whatever else I wanted in my academic diet, I had to fit them in around the staples of English, Maths, at least two Science GCSEs, history or geography, one modern language, and a handful more compulsory subjects on top.

Sound familiar so far? Yep – if it had been around back then, I would have been awarded the English Baccalaureate. The measure that Michael Gove has decided shall be the measure of a good school would have found my school to be good. Not a shocker: it was found to be good under all the old measures too. It was a selective school. The kids that went there had at least one of any number of advantages – ability in certain subjects; parents who were able to take an active interest in their children’s education; parents who could afford private tuition – before they even arrived. Are these really the kids who need to benefit from a shake-up in the curriculum?

By narrowing the definition of a ‘good’ school to ‘a school that does well at the subjects Michael Gove thinks are important’, the government is denying the achievements of hundreds of young people who got their GCSE results the other week – and they are cursing hundreds of schools to fail.

Gove insists this is about raising standards, and that “Labour got its priorities wrong and said kids from poor homes could not do difficult subjects”. Got that? Not only does Gove get to define ‘good’, he gets to define ‘difficult’. The difficult subjects are the ones he did at school. Was that some sort of academic masochism or is he just showing off?

You know what I found most difficult at school? (Apart from holding back tears of humiliation during netball, that is.) Design Technology. Woodwork. We had to do it to GCSE at my school in those days. Creating massive ‘specifications’ for moving wooden toys and presenting them beautifully on A3 paper. I couldn’t be doing with it. I couldn’t draw straight lines, even with a ruler; my massive pieces of paper got all crumpled up in my bag; and as for actually making things out of wood, forget it. I was scared of chisels. I wrote a murder mystery for English in which a teacher murdered me with a mallet. The machinery in the workshop – sanders and drills and saws, oh my – haunted my dreams with their promise of mangled fingers.

I got out of it by going on a homework strike. It may have been wrong while the negotiations between my mother and the head of year were ongoing, but it worked. My school finally agreed to let me play to my strengths, or at least to avoid the weakest of my weaknesses. So why can’t we have an award that encourages schools to do that?

One headteacher has come up with one. The Modern Baccalaureate is the brainchild of Andrew Chubb, head of the Archbishop Sentamu Academy in Hull. The ‘ModBac’ not only includes ICT as a core subject – which makes such basic sense that it seems astonishing that the EBacc doesn’t – but allows young people to pick some of their own subjects on top of the core, and to put their choices together themselves.

The ModBac crew are hoping to get 40 schools together for a pilot – quite apart from anything else, it offers schools an opportunity to work together while the government does its best to set them against one another.

With the right-wing press eating up Gove’s rhetoric on traditional academic rigour, the ModBac-ers (I was thinking of doing a thing where I refer to them as Mods throughout this article and hope it catches on, but then Gove and the EBacc fans would have to be Rockers, and that just wouldn’t work) will have to get a lot of schools involved to combat the effect of league tables being ranked on the EBacc alone. I very much hope they succeed. The country just isn’t ready for wave after wave of reckless homework strikes.