Justice, please
Justice, please
Justice, please
It’s seven weeks to the day since the GCSE fiasco broke. Since then it hasn’t gone away.
Today, as I write (5:30 am), it’s leading the BBC online headlines and (as I listen) number two on the Classic FM news bulletins.
Today’s narrative goes like this:
Thousands of pupils resit English GCSEs
More than 45,000 students are to resit their English GCSEs next month after a row about grades, figures given to the BBC by exam boards show.
The figure is about one in 14 of those who took the exam earlier this year.
It’s very, very important to keep saying that this is a result of a cynical move by Ofqual to shift the blame from their failure to regulate and the awarding organisations’ craven weakness in not defending the standards which they say they believed in. They patently caved in to pressure from Ofqual.
Since results day, we’ve learnt of Ofqual’s obsession with comparable outcomes. Here’s how their Acting Director of Standards wrote in the TES:
the purpose of comparable outcomes was to maintain qualification level standards year on year.
It means that unless somehow students’ results in the November resits show that the quality of the teaching has got better, then the same application of comparable standards will apply.
And how could the results possibly do that?
Because, of course, the teaching won’t have got better since the students sat their exam in June. There’s been a long holiday, many of them will have moved on to various courses at college, and most will not therefore have received any additional English teaching.
Their results, therefore, are likely to fall into exactly the same pattern as the June marking.
And no doubt the awarding organisations - desperate to win the new contracts to be sole providers of qualifications - will dutifully jump into line.
The outcomes will no doubt be seized upon to show that (a) Ofqual’s judgement in August was right, (b) they were being tough on standards, (c) Michael Gove was right not to intervene, (d) students were never really up to a grade C, (e) it’s all their and their teachers’ fault, and (f) we can put the fiasco behind us and look forward to the shimmering new dawn of the English Baccalaureate Certificate.
Well, that’s not how many of us see it.
The unfairness of more than 50,000 students being downgraded because of changes to grade boundaries within a year hasn’t gone away.
And nor will it, if many of us have our way.
Which is why - on the day this story leads the headlines - I’m delighted to be heading to the Council meeting in Reading of the Association of School & College Leaders where the GCSE fiasco is the main item. And I’m delighted that we learnt yesterday that the legal challenge is going ahead.
So - as ever - let’s not think that we’ve heard the last of the GCSE fiasco story. In fact, the English part of it may still be masking how much similar practices took place in the management of outcomes in other subjects.
It’s good to see the story continues to resonate across the media.
So it should: because unfairness and cynical ploys to deflect criticism and lack of accountability and poor leadership are the potent ingredients in many an important story.
And that is precisely what we have here - an important story that needs a just and transparent resolution.
Geoff Barton
Thursday 11 October 2012
6:15 am
Thursday, 11 October 2012