“Education, education, education..” - Tony Blair

So good he named it thrice…

If you throw enough money at something, you can make it support your social engineering aims. Or can you? While, in the May election campaign, our politicians tried to out-spend each other in an orgy of profligacy the real results of all this increased spending are staring us in the face - and it appears things are coming apart at the seams:

Ruth Lea, Institute of Directors:

We congratulate students for their success and hard work but, from an employer’s point of view, the A-level now is not the A-level of 20 years ago.

Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools:

We cannot have a situation where young people are kept for longer and longer at school, and at greater and greater public expense, but who end up in fact knowing no more than people in the past did who left school younger.

He said that if everyone passed an examination it was not fulfilling its prime function of discriminating between them.

Yes, well, if you use a word like ‘discriminating’ within 3 miles of a liberal/leftist you’re asking for trouble Mr Woodhead.

New Labour wants equality of outcome - no matter how low the standards have to drop to achieve that. This means, amongst many other things, that some A level students - with decent grade passes - now enter university without the required knowledge to even begin their chosen degree.

Universities now have to offer remedial courses to bring the student up to the level that, 10 years ago, he would have naturally reached by virtue of having attained the A level.

Annis Garfield, examiner:

I am the examiner, referred to by John Clare in his Any Questions? column who has been told that 26 per cent of the candidates must be awarded a grade A (80 marks out of 100) and that the average candidate is to be given a C (60 out of 100) - no matter how undeserving their answers may be.

This, I have been told by my chief examiner, who accused me of being too mean with my marks, is the predetermined result. He has instructed me to mark more leniently - in other words, to lower my standards.

Read the whole article here - it would make you laugh if it weren’t so serious. By the way, she was fired for speaking to the press.

After years of denying A-levels were getting easier New Labour has to face the facts. In February this year Ruth Kelly says I’ll make GCSEs and A-levels harder. She confessed:

Children are not being stretched and challenged in the way I would like them to be.

David Bell, head of Ofsted: The failure rate of England’s further education colleges is a national disgrace. He added:

If you happen to be a 16 year old looking for a second chance, having not done very well at school, tough luck. If at first you don’t succeed, you don’t succeed.

And this, from December, is damning:

The United Kingdom has slipped significantly down the world education league, particularly in maths, a report said yesterday.

In the second round of tests conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) involving more than 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, it dropped in three years from fourth in science to 11th, from seventh in reading to 11th and from eighth in maths to 18th.

But what really shows the government up for the lies it has been telling us about ‘rising standards’ is this:

The UK’s declining performance in reading, which contrasts sharply with rising scores in national tests, is particularly embarrassing for the Government because the standard of Pisa’s tests is held constant. Questions are repeated from year to year, whereas the comparability of national tests is questionable.

Since the first Pisa round, the UK’s reading score has dropped from 523 to 507.

So a standard, unchanging test shows our performance declining, the government’s scoring system shows it’s rising. One has a vested interest in showing the true state of play while the other has a vested interest in showing year on year improvement. I think we can draw our own conclusions.

Finally, you might think that the Labour-dominated ‘Commons Education and Skills Select Committee’ could deliver Mr Blair some cheering news:

From January this year:

THE Government is wrong to claim that billions of pounds in extra funding for schools has produced better examination results, the powerful committee of MPs said yesterday.

The Labour-dominated committee chastised Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, for saying that “the sustained high investment in education since 1997 has resulted in a measurable improvement in standards

They went further. From The Times, ‘Schools still cannot teach pupils to read by age of 11′:

“Even if government figures are taken at face value, at age 11 around 20 per cent of children still do not achieve the success in reading (and writing) expected of their age. This figure is unacceptably high,” it said.

It all makes for very depressing reading - especially if you, like me, have a child just entering the comprehensive school system.

Anyway, no use in moping. I’m not doing much this afternoon - I think I’ll get myself an A-level…

(Note: this post, in a slightly altered form, appeared in my previous blog, A Very British Insurgency - which is now closed)