The only book you need to pack this summer
‘I’m scared for Thursday.” The brief text from a friend that pinged on my phone in the small hours of yesterday morning needed no further explanation. Parents across the country will be experiencing the same gnawing knot in the gut, the same foreboding. My friend’s twins get their A-level results tomorrow. Both are predicted good grades and should make their university offers. But, in the present chaos, who knows?
Because schools were closed unnecessarily back in March by panicking politicians, egged on by a hysterical media, Olivia and Ned, and millions of other pupils, were not allowed to prove what they could do – even though there is not a single recorded case in the world of a teacher being infected with Covid by a pupil, and, let’s face it, very few activities are more socially distanced than an exam.
Now, with education put on hold for six months, the same panicking adults have inflicted further stress on youngsters by allowing an algorithm, not a human being, to determine whether they succeed or fail.
Enough is enough. British children have been treated appallingly during the coronacrisis. It is a sobering fact that you can now take your 16-year-old down the pub, but not to school. If only, you think, teenagers had arranged to sit their exams in the Covid-secure saloon bar of The Dog and Duck!
When A-level results become public tomorrow, there will be none of those charming pictures of cock-a-hoop kids beaming with pride and relief. What should be an exciting milestone on the road to adulthood is now more like the UK’S first Dutch-style roundabout, which has just opened half a mile from Pearson Towers.
A Wacky Races of gyratory hell, the £2.3million roundabout is laid out so motorists have to give way to cyclists and pedestrians, just as youngsters have had to make way for the elderly and other groups at risk from the virus. Like the double-dutch roundabout – which had to close for a few days when a car ploughed into a beacon – the Class of 2020 is a car crash waiting to happen.
For those of you not up to speed with the complete Horlicks that the Department of Education and militant teaching unions have made of a few million children’s lives, here is the story so far.
Having failed to postpone GCSES and A-levels till later in the summer and sensibly push back university applications, no exams were taken at all. Instead, students were given predicted grades allocated by their teachers, based on mock results and coursework. There was a fear that teachers’ estimates could lead to the dreaded “grade inflation”, so Ofqual, the exam regulator, moderated their predictions using a “statistical model”. (And we know how well statistical models by priapic professors have worked out during the epidemic, don’t we…?)
Taking no account of the actual child, the model arrives at a score by assessing their school’s record over the past three years and the pupil’s rank in class. No credit is given for the fact that a school may have improved, or that one year-group’s ability can be drastically different from another.
So, Daniel and Izzy, you’re 17-yearsold and ambitious members of a bright, hard-working cohort in a below-average school? Bad luck! Your results will only be as good as the track record of the institution you attended.
Pupils who underperformed in their mocks – basically, that’s all boys who, for complex, testosterone-related reasons, favour the Winging It method – had no chance to redeem themselves on exam day. As for that driven girl in a bog-standard comp with her heart set on a Law place at a Russell Group university (a girl very like your columnist back in the Seventies…), at the machine whim of an Ofqual data set, she had her predicted grade reduced from A to C because no one at her school had ever done that well
If supermarket staff had insisted on the same standards, we would all have starved
before. So much for social mobility and an individual being judged on merit.
When the Scottish Higher results came out last week, 124,000 predicted grades had been lowered, and the pass rate of pupils in the most deprived areas was reduced by 15.2 per cent from original teacher estimates, compared to that of youngsters from the most affluent backgrounds, which dropped by 6.9 per cent.
So furious was the uproar that, on Monday, Nicola Sturgeon did that thing politicians only do when they hear the guillotine being sharpened by the mob. “We did not get this right,” the First Minister admitted. The problem would be fixed, she promised.
Sure enough, yesterday the Scottish Government took the extraordinary step of reverting those 124,000 exam results to the grades estimated by teachers. I confidently predict a similar fiasco tomorrow in England and Wales, followed by an equally swift reverse ferret.
Defending the cruelly flawed method of assessment, Roger Taylor, chairman of Ofqual, said that awarding grades based only on teacher judgment would have “created perpetual unfairness between this year’s grades compared to past and future generations”.
Perpetual unfairness? Has Mr Taylor perhaps not noticed the terrible luck of a pandemic that has deprived a generation of half a year of education and thwarted their prospects? Give students their predicted grades, for goodness sake, man! What’s a little grade inflation set against four million unemployed?
Alex, a teacher I know, surely got it right when he said he was “generous” in the exam grades he predicted for girls he has taught since they were 11. “They’ve had a bloody awful time, the least we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt. There won’t be any jobs for them anyway,” he says sadly.
There are many dedicated teachers like Alex who care deeply about their pupils. Increasingly, they are brought into disrepute by teaching unions who act as if students were merely grubby vectors of potential infection to their members, rather than vulnerable young people who desperately need to be back in the classroom.
But the bolshie unions could not have kept schools shut so long had Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, and his civil servants not handed them an almighty weapon in the shape of byzantine “safety” guidance. One despairing head tells me she has received over 500 pages on how to reopen her school so that pupils, at no risk from Covid-19, can be, er, protected from Covid-19.
“The guidance changes almost daily,” she sighs. Absurdly, many schools in England are still struggling to figure out how to implement the two-metre social-distancing rules long since abandoned by commercial businesses like airlines, who sardine passengers on to their flights regardless. Seriously, if supermarket workers had insisted on the same impossible standards of safety as the teachers, we would all have starved.
This is a uniquely British embarrassment. Children in 22 other Europeans countries have resumed their learning. On Monday, every school in Berlin opened fully with no social-distancing measures, and only a requirement for secondary-age children to wear a mask on school premises, although not in lessons. Perhaps Mr Williamson could ask the unions what is so different about teachers in the German capital – apart from the fact they’re not all Marxists who relish trying to bring down an elected government?
Belatedly weighing into the scandal, the Prime Minister wrote this week that the country has a “moral duty” to get all children back into school next month. It certainly does. But Boris’s “national priority” is hampered by the fact that his government continues to pump out infantile, sub-cbeebies propaganda about the terrifying virus, which plays right into the unions’ hands. Covid may have disappeared from vast swathes of the country, our hospitals are empty and the rise in “cases” is a fuss about nothing, but too many parents are still worried about sending their children to school. For this, the Government is to blame.
“I’m scared for Thursday,” my friend texted. Frankly, we should all be scared about the damage being done to our demoralised young. It will only get worse if the exams fiasco isn’t fixed. If necessary, universities must lower their entry requirements, just for this year, and resits should be offered to all that want them.
Tomorrow should be a national day of support and happiness for A-level students. If anyone has failed, it’s the adults.