Question Time
Question Time
Question Time
Er ... so hang on.
I know I’ve been in France for a few days, popping up sporadically in the Twittersphere, but actually in the real world having a genuine holiday.
But now I’m back and wondering whether I have got this right:
Ofqual spends three days initially denying there’s a problem with GCSE English and then, as pressure mounts, changes direction and puts together a report. In it, they acknowledge that January English exams were marked too generously but it’s somehow the fault of teachers for over-marking controlled assessments, or not understanding grade boundaries, or of bewildered examiners having to adapt to a new system?
The TES reveals today that Ofqual was alerted to the potential problem in 2009, but we’ve heard nothing about that from Ofqual about this, have we - how they might have done what we ought reasonably to expect a national regulatory body to do - to think strategically, to plan, to monitor, to pre-empt?
And despite clearly identifying a definite problem today, it seems nothing will be done, except - most cynically and disgracefully - offering grade D students a free re-mark, as if that’s some kind of must-have perk?
Were we being naive to have expected anything other than what we got from today’s Ofqual report, squeezed out as it was into the public domain at almost the latest possible hour of the working day on a Friday at the end of August?
Shouldn’t it have told us why the January results were so patently wrong and why those of us who never entered students in January are now being punished by some ad hoc quota system?
Shouldn’t Ofqual, as regulator of exams, be telling us what action is being taken against those who got it wrong? How many examiners and officials are losing their jobs as a result of up to 60,000 students not gaining the grade they were predicted? What action is being taken against the examination boards? It’s surely not business as usual, is it?
Shouldn’t Ofqual be explaining why as examination regulator they hadn’t - despite the warnings from 2009 - put checks in place to ensure this year’s fiasco hadn’t happened?
And shouldn’t Michael Gove be making a teeny appearance on the scene to tell us whether he’s on the side of Ofqual or the students betrayed by the ineptitude of examiners and his quango?
Shouldn’t he be explaining to the headteachers of schools that have dropped below the 40% floor target - so recently being trailed as the level below which schools would be taken over or closed - what they should expect in the coming year?
Shouldn’t we all articulate the utter cynical nonsense of the GCSE re-sit lie: many of these students will have left school; they won’t be being taught English any more; their chances of getting a C in this brave new world of shifting boundaries will get harder as every week passes. Shouldn’t someone be honest and explain that it’s not like sending back a faulty X-Box and getting a new one? Their chances of success will diminish and reinforce the prevailing view that it’s their teachers’ fault.
Shouldn’t we all loudly proclaim that this is a very gloomy day indeed for our education system, when an incompetent regulator uses silky prose in the hope of evading its obvious failed accountability for national standards?
It might just be that this fiasco will mark a turning-point. And tomorrow I’ll make some suggestions - now we have Ofqual’s limp, fool-no-one report - about where we go from here.
Geoff Barton
Friday 31 August 2012
10:38
Friday, 31 August 2012