Nearly 98% of students taking the GCSE exam passed. I tell you, that 2% that didn’t must feel pretty stupid…
But pupils have been criticised for opting for so-called easier courses, and employers lashed out saying standards were still slipping leaving students lacking basic skills.
The Institute of Directors said many children left school without basic reading and writing skills.
“The starting point for employers recruiting staff is surely to have access to candidates with basic literacy and numeracy skills. We are not there yet,” said Richard Wilson, Head of Business Policy at the IoD.
Want to know one of the reasons why our youth are becoming less educated? Lack of aspiration.
No, not amongst the youth, silly. Amongst the incompetents who run our country:
Jacqui Smith, minister for schools, said the Government was working with employers to ensure “functional” English and Maths were studied in GCSEs.
Functional? That’s what we aspire to? Just ‘functional’? So if you aim for ‘functional’ - which is in itself a tragically low standard - and then fall short what do you get? How about ‘Neanderthal’?
And the incompetents who want to run our country:
Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said GCSEs were “failing” and should now be replaced.
That’s right, mess a thing up and then throw it away. What will you replace it with? If the underlying attitudes in education are that we must aim for equality of outcome what use is just replacing it? The phrase, “Same s**t, different bucket”, springs to mind…
The students themselves are getting irritated by the low quality of their exams:
Students at Magdalen College independent school (MCS) in Oxford joined their deputy headmaster Richard Cairns in speaking out at their frustration at the “patronising” exams which often award full-marks even if errors are made.
And the attack on working class aspirations was made clear by MCS’s deputy headmaster Richard Cairns:
“It is effectively left to individual schools to provide the extra intellectual stimulation that bright teenagers demand but some schools are better placed than others to offer this extra dimension.
“Some very clever boys and girls from academically deprived backgrounds are doubtless missing out. There is, in my view, a stronger case than ever for the state to support scholars at leading independent schools, selected on the basis of academic ability and genuine financial need.”
For as long as we are governed by a party whose ambitions are not the improvement of the British people but the furthering of their leftist ideological obsessions there is no hope in sight. When a 23 year old Guardian journalist can obtain an A grade in his AS level sociology degree after just two weeks of studying and nearly everybody who takes this nation’s main exams - the GCSE and the A-level - passes them we know we are hurtling in the wrong direction.
For those of us with children in education the private sector seems to be the only place to go. Ironic it would be indeed if our anti-elitist rulers were the main cause of an expansion in private education…
