Question Time
Question Time
Question Time
In his 1991 book of memoirs, called Memoirs, writer Kingsley Amis recalls a conversation in which he asks Roald Dahl about his secret of writing so many successful children’s books. Dahl responds bluntly along the lines of: ‘Well, the little bastards will swallow anything’.
This weekend I was thinking the same about the Daily Mail with all their screeching headlines about the return to O-levels and the reclamation of rigour. Not for the first time, Mr Gove was described in terms I’d have thought might be reserved for the second coming of the Messiah.
But after the unholy hype what we finally got in the House of Commons today was quite different - lacklustre, nostalgic, portentous, self-important and disappointing.
And once again the Opposition didn’t really nail it.
Here’s some questions that Stephen Twigg could have been asking from the Labour benches:
1: Wasn’t GCSE introduced by the Conservative administration in 1984 as a universal exam and isn’t it successive tinkering by governments and abysmal failure to regulate by Ofqual that has undermined it?
2: Wouldn’t you agree that your continual rubbishing of GCSE and caricaturing it as lacking rigour unfair to the current and future generation of students and their teachers who will be working on it? Isn’t this corrosive language precisely part of the problem?
3: Why would we want to call an English qualification a baccalaureate, especially when it shares so few features with the principles and ideals of the international baccalaureate?
4: Isn’t the assessment model - a three-hour exam - inflexible, potentially constraining and unimaginative? Are we learning from what the international superstars are doing - those countries we keep getting exhorted to aspire to be like?
5: Isn’t the development of exams without a curriculum reinforcing the notion of a conveyor-belt assessment system in which exams matter more than a planned approach to what Mr Gove used to describe as ‘the best that has been thought and said’?
6: Isn’t the lack of consultation with the teaching profession a critical weakness? Can’t you see that without teacher goodwill it will be difficult to impose an examination that will work?
7: Isn’t the lack of ambition - in an age when students stay in learning to 17 and when Kenneth Baker laments the limited nature of what’s on offer - a sign of a hastily cut-and-pasted clutch of ideas, fired off in a blaze of Sunday paper soundbites? Where’s the substance, the pedagogy, the radicalism?
8: Isn’t the constant association of a new exam with O-levels misleading? Where did it come from? Was someone briefing the press that these were - as was widely reported this weekend - a return to O-levels? If so, why?
9: Isn’t there rather a lot of unfinished business before this next set of wacky wheezes - in particular addressing the gross unfairness of a regulator’s incompetence being taken out on around 50,000 GCSE students? No one thinks that issue will go away, do they?
10: Do you agree with the Deputy Prime Minister’s assessment that the changes would "raise standards for all our children", but would "not exclude any children"? So - just to be clear - that’s ‘rigour’ AND ‘all must have prizes’, right?
If we’re going to overhaul GCSEs, could we do it properly, in a considered way, please?
Any chance someone - anyone - could do a bit more work on all of this, so that we can see beyond the flummery and have some proposals fit for the twenty-first century?
And there’s no rush.
Geoff Barton
17 September 2012
22:15
Monday, 17 September 2012