Saturday Kitchen
Saturday Kitchen
Saturday Kitchen
Me: I love metaphors. In fact, last year I read a brilliant book by James Geary called I Is An Other. It was all about metaphors.
Metaphors help us to understand the world, to explain it, to come to terms with its intricacies and mysteries. We’re using a metaphor every time we say ‘I see what you mean’ (since, literally, we aren’t seeing it). We’re using a metaphor when we ‘grasp’ a concept or ‘fathom out’ a problem (fathoms were the archaic measurement from fingertip to fingertip: when we put our arms around something, we have grasped it, possessed it, fathomed it. Fathoms became the ubiquitous measurement of seafaring: ‘full fathom five they father lies’).
So we use metaphors even when they are dead - when the images they evoke no longer have any immediacy. A good example is the ever-fashionable concept of target-setting. We proudly boast of hitting our targets or, on exceptional days, of exceeding our targets.
It’s a dead metaphor because a target is, if you think about it, something we fire arrows at. Hitting our target is an undoubted success, but exceeding our target? It means we’ve missed: the arrow has misfired, gone too far. The metaphor is dead, is lifeless, has given up the ghost.
So we grope after metaphors to help us to come to terms with the wayward, the inexplicable, the unfathomable.
Like, er, Ofqual.
And since those early whisperings began to emanate on Thursday night that our esteemed regulator was about to issue a final, definitive report on the summer’s GCSE fiasco I started desperately seeking metaphors.
Because the rumours proved to be correct with their ominous hints of Ofqual’s devastating revelation: ‘it was the teachers wot done it’.
The finger of blame was pointed most directly, most witheringly, most shamefully, at us - the teachers.
The first official indication of this was the I’s front page, released by the ever-brilliant Nick Sutton with his nightly preview of the next day’s newspaper front pages.
“‘Shocked’ Ofqual accuses teachers of cheating” ran the headline.
They were shocked?
I suspect I was like everyone else in running through a gamut of emotions (that’s a dead metaphor, by the way, as well as a cliche, and one I didn’t understand till I looked it up just now).
For me, it started with fury, then switched to bewilderment, then lurched back to fury again, and then - as Glenys Stacey began expressing her sympathy for the pressure we teachers are under - morphed into a grim sensation of being suffocatingly patronised.
Given the choice, I think I’ll stick with fury.
And it’s from this dark mood (look, I’ll stop flagging up metaphors now, all right?) that I hit upon (stop it) what we might call the metaphor du jour, the metaphor that sums up where I think we are.
It’s the pressure cooker.
My hobby’s cooking, but we don’t have a pressure cooker here. In my childhood these devices were talked about as newfangled and vaguely risky, the culinary equivalent of ITV (ours was a firmly BBC-loyal household).
The general feeling was that they could explode, taking your lunch, your kitchen walls and possibly your own mortality up with them.
So ever since I’ve resisted pressure cookers.
But they seem oddly appropriate now because pressure cookers work by having a regulator on the top - something that controls the temperature inside by periodically releasing steam. The regulator regulates. (I know: you’ve guessed where this is going, but stick with it).
And that’s precisely the problem we have in our own heady and dysfunctional education system: a regulator that’s quick to blame but apparently incapable of regulating.
I simply don’t buy the ‘teachers cheating’ explanation for a fiasco on this scale. Of course some rogue teachers in some departments in some schools may have over-marked controlled assessments. That’s one of the reasons (at our school) we have to pay £125,000 a year to exam boards to do their job - to moderate coursework through random sampling.
It’s why - as a former Second-in-English and Head of English - I know how seriously we took and still take the painfully tedious discussions about standardising, and how fearful we are of being deemed to have over-marked (with the result that we probably under-mark). We know all of that - at least, in schools we know it.
It’s why as a country we employ a national regulator who, in their submission to the Parliamentary Committee this week, accepted that ‘Ofqual is not yet at full strength, that it lacks expertise in research and (wait for it) assessment’
So it’s a bit bleedin’ rich to blame the teachers.
As teachers, it’s our job to plan lessons, teach them, and prepare students to take their place in a complex world. It isn’t our job to think up qualifications, to design them, to write the exam papers. It isn’t our job to make sure they’re fit for purpose. It’s what we pay exam boards to do. And it’s what our Government pays Ofqual to do.
Which brings us back to the metaphor of regulation.
Because to my mind regulation is a process, not an end-result. If there was a problem ten months ago with January English papers, then someone somewhere should have noticed it and begun to address it. If some English departments were getting their marking of controlled assessments wrong, then that should have been tackled.
That’s what exam boards and regulators are supposed to do.
And that’s where the plot positively curdles.
Because the leaked letter to the TES back in September showed that at least one examination board was saying categorically that it believed that its standards were correct; its examiners steadfastly stood by their marking.
Ofqual, as the letter reveals, directed them to shift the grade boundaries.
So at that point, according to Ofqual, it was the awarding organisations’ fault: they had given out too many C grades in January, so the June cohort would pay the price. This was the principle of their much-repeated mantra of ‘comparable outcomes’.
The awarding organisations dutifully did as they were told. Grade boundaries shifted massively and thousands of young people paid the price.
Since then - with a madcap bastard qualification being conceived in the bowels of Sanctuary Buildings and the obvious vested interests of the exam boards who will want to be paid to run it - any public comment from awarding organisations has evaporated. The stakes are too high for them to be seen to go against Ofqual.
So now it’s not the examiners’ fault. It’s the teachers’.
Under the cosh of performance tables and a Stalinist accountability regime we have apparently buckled and crumbled and cheated.
Except that if I were an examiner or moderator who wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror each day and see some integrity, I’d be feeling pretty cheapened by this sordid business.
If I believed in August that our systems for moderation and control were right, I hope I would want to say so. I think I’d be thinking that the time has come to say enough is enough.
It’s the same if I were working at the DfE. If I were Michael Gove or David Laws - both strikingly silent yesterday on the day that teachers across England were being publicly rubbished - I’d want to speak out. I’d want to turn Ofqual’s finger of blame back on itself and say ‘Hang on - wasn’t this your job - to regulate the system?’
Then - forgive the whiff of Wilshaw machismo - I think I’d want to fire the regulator.
Because no one with any sanity believes that Ofqual has credibility. If it thinks its job is merely to present squalid reports in hindsight, then they have missed the point. Regulation is a process and a responsibility: it’s not a case of offering up a smug, pre-packaged post-mortem and expressing synthetic sympathy for the nation’s beleaguered teachers.
Which brings us to what we do next.
I think the Ofqual report may mark a turning-point.
First, we owe it to our students and their parents to keep campaigning for justice. Their work should be re-graded so that a C today means the same as a C in January and a C last June. It’s about fairness.
Second, the Secretary of State and his team should recognise that quacking cliches about the independence of Ofqual has become a smokescreen for a lack of leadership. Ofqual and the exam boards should be held accountable for their incompetence. At the very least, it’s a value-for-money issue: what are we - the humble taxpayer - getting for our hefty expenditure?
Third, school leaders and heads of English should - where possible - immediately stop playing the performance table game. We should stick two fingers up to the whole sorry system. We should refuse to take any part in developing the appalling new EBC qualification. Unless desperate for the money, we should withdraw our services as examiners and moderators. And as unions, we should pass a vote of no-confidence in Ofqual, the regulator that has patently failed to regulate.
Then we should focus on what matters: simply do our best to teach the stuff that we believe is most important to a generation of young people who need great teachers more than they ever did, and who, in the light of yesterday’s disgraceful Ofqual report publicly lambasting teachers, may start to wonder who they can trust.
In other words, let’s go back to what we came into teaching for and leave leave the rest of them to their sordid and sorrowful politicking.
Let’s just teach.
Oh - and best wishes for the half term ahead. As ever, the classroom is a sanctuary where we can remind ourselves of the endless optimism and fun of working with young people whose futures lie shimmeringly ahead of them. Helping them, learning from them, teaching them remains such a privilege, despite the nonsense swirling outside.
Yes: let’s just teach.
Geoff Barton
Saturday 3 November
12:20
Saturday, 3 November 2012