Results may be out, but GCSE madness abounds
Is that your daughter and her friends, photographed for the front page, delightedly jumping in the air for academic joy? How great, you must be thrilled. What about that beaming boy, being punched in the arm by his grinning mates as he holds his exam results aloft, is he your son? If so, hearty congratulations.
No need to read any further, not least because it will probably spoil your justifiably sunny mood. But if your child is the very opposite of elated, or simply quietly relieved rather than wildly celebratory, then you are probably in the majority. And for all of you parents the stressful nightmare is far from over. I know because I’ve spent the past 24 hours frantically firing off emails, trying to get my daughter a place at sixth form. I’ve left rambling messages on unmanned lines, I’ve considered sending off begging letters by registered post.
Why? Because it’s GCSE “Clearing Day” as students anxiously try to get places on courses based on their actual, rather than predicted, results.
To explain: although my daughter got a fantastic grade in art, which she wants to study, her grade in maths, which she does not want to study, isn’t deemed high enough to gain entry into the sixth form of her choice – to do fine art.
Meanwhile her friend did not get as high a grade in art, which she too wants to study but she got a lot higher in maths, which she does not want to study, and as a result she will be attending that very same sixth form – to do fine art.
It’s the sort of twisted logic worthy of Lewis Carroll. Now, if I had a fiver for every friend and colleague loftily reassuring me that, in the grand scheme of things, GCSE results are not the be-all and end-all, I’d have enough cash to set my daughter up in her own mobile nail business and never worry another day in my life.
It’s true that once you did your O-levels, you moved onto A-levels and nobody cared. But these days GCSES are no longer an educational milestone, rather they are a hurdle in their own right.
Progressing to sixth form is now like choosing a university. The nation’s 15 and 16-year-olds must apply to sixth forms, which then make offers based on predicted results supplied by their teachers – and face-to-face interviews. Oh and due to a shake-up in As-levels, universities will assess applicants largely by their GCSES.
Inevitably that means the best sixth forms are oversubscribed. So they can afford to cherry pick and hike up entry requirements howsoever they please.
My daughter was not predicted a good enough grade in maths even to get to the interview stage so she could talk articulately about the arts and humanities, which she is good at and passionate about. Her high English grades are immaterial.
Frankly it felt like a miracle that she passed maths at all. In her mock exam she got a U, because like half the population, her strengths lie in literacy not wilfully difficult numeracy. Since her mocks, my daughter’s lovely, dedicated maths teacher went beyond the call of duty; early morning classes, late afternoon interventions, encouragement – even the occasional croissant to keep her wilting spirits up. I paid for tutors and crammer courses. And it was worth it because she passed with a little legroom to spare.
Was that because the exam board had lowered the grade boundaries to 17 per cent to avoid academic Armageddon? Possibly. I don’t care.
My girl worked hard. She sat 23 exams and passed everything. I hugged her tourniquet-tight with relief and pride as some of her friends sobbed with distress and others set the world alight with a hat trick of grade 9s. Were the numbers on my daughter’s results paper a faithful reflection of her abilities? Not really. To be brutally honest, they were the outcome of a Guinea Pig GCSE omnishambles and I just wanted it to be over.
Take a new and outrageously difficult curriculum, add punitive exams, riddle them with trick questions and then lower the grade boundaries. The needless complexity was mind-boggling.
There were higher tier papers. Lower tier papers. Familiar letters ditched in favour of marks from 9 to 1. If your child sat double science, they could have 17 different possible grades.
Seriously, that’s not an exaggeration; it’s up there on the Ofqual website.
It will bed down, of course it will, but too late for this year’s poleaxed cohort. Reform was necessary; in recent years kids of average ability were pushing around Weimar Republic-style wheelbarrows on results day, filled with hyperinflated A* grades.
But as parents we have watched our shining children reduced to tearful wrecks and depressed insomniacs over the past two years by the sheer grinding pressure and volume of work.
Why? Because the then education secretary Michael Gove was obsessed with the A* brigade and wanted to pinpoint the brightest of the bright, flush out the future captains of industry who would score 9s (the equivalent of an A**) as opposed to those who merely reached 7s. The 6s and 5s could presumably go whistle.
“By making GCSES more demanding, more fulfilling and more stretching we can give our young people the broad, deep and balanced education which will equip them to win the global race,” he said at the time.
Make no mistake, this was all about economics, personal ego and beating Singapore and Japan in the world education league tables, not our children’s best educational interests and certainly not in the pursuit of creative thinking, which we used to excel at.
And so, instead of carefully calibrating, then resetting the pendulum, he swung it too far in the opposite direction and sucked the joy out of learning.
I am genuinely pleased for those whose kids sailed through. I have no problem with elitism, I believe in a meritocracy; but that is predicated on an even playing field.
How can it be that a student with a talent for art – or languages or history – is refused a sixth form place because their maths grade was too low?
This is not a gripe about failure, it’s about fairness. And fairness is arguably the most important lesson any of our children will ever learn.