If we ditch school exams, they may go for good
Debate continues to rage about whether next summer’s exams should be scrapped. Lord Baker, who invented GCSES as education secretary in the Eighties, is one of those who think they should be. He says it is already too late for schools badly affected by the coronavirus to catch up: teacher assessment should take the place of exams.
It is hard for outsiders to judge the practicalities here. Obviously it would be unfair to make pupils sit exams for which, through no fault of their own, they have not been properly prepared.
Yet abandoning exams is a big step, for wider reasons. As the head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, has already pointed out, many schools fear that older pupils “simply won’t return to schools” for the rest of the academic year if there is no exam to work towards.
There is a reason for this: a public examination is supposed to be an objective standard. That is what makes it valuable to employers and to pupils’ self-esteem. Take it away, and both the pupil and the outside world are left floundering.
“Why bother, if there’s no guarantee I’ve learnt anything?” a pupil might reasonably ask.
Apply this argument to the driving test. It is currently much harder, because of Covid, to have driving lessons, and to take the test itself. But imagine if it were suggested that driving instructors could assess their own pupils and pass them. The incentive of the instructor would be to pass as many as possible.
There would be a public outcry, because of the danger to others on the road. (There would also be an outcry from any would-be drivers who had been failed on the say-so of one instructor.)
This probably won’t happen – though something like it did during the Second World War – because people seriously do not want to be killed by bad drivers. But we ought to recognise that GCSES and A-levels, while not literally a matter of life and death, are certainly a matter of life chances. The less objective they are, the worse life chances they offer.
For more than half a century, there has been a strong movement among some teachers against exams. Observing (often correctly) that exams are rather crude measurements, they jump (usually incorrectly) to the conclusion that we would be better off without them. That lobby still thrives. One must fear that if our teaching system cannot manage proper exams by next summer, 15 months after Covid first loomed, they will never be fully restored.
“What was an exam, Granny?” children will ask. “Oh well, dear, it was one of those funny old things which people used to think important – like playing with friends, or holding hands – but it went out with Covid.”
Supporters of Boris Johnson’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, defend her right to intervene. She has been criticised for allegedly trying to dictate whom her man appoints. They are probably right that talk of “Lady Macbeth” is a weapon from the old misogynist tool-box which regards any woman with power as suspect.
They should acknowledge, however, that the subject is a tricky one, and has got trickier in modern times.
Until 1997, there was never really “a power couple” in 10 Downing Street. True, Denis Thatcher had enjoyed a successful career in business, but by the day his wife became our first woman prime minister, he had retired. The spouses of other prime ministers (all of them women) had often been remarkable people, but none of them had a career in the modern sense.
Cherie Blair, on the other hand, was a barrister, indeed a more successful one than her husband Tony, and had also been selected as a Labour candidate. In the general election of 1983, he won a seat and she didn’t.
If it had been the other way round, who knows what would have happened? Both parties to the marriage were career people. It therefore felt natural to Mrs Blair to get involved when her husband was prime minister, and to resent people’s objections. After all, she felt qualified. Yet the objections were not completely ill-founded: in a democracy, after all, you elect the person on the ballot paper. The spouse has no mandate.
Now that people frequently pick spouses on a basis of career equality, they frequently choose mates in similar trades, thus adding to the cliquey feeling which voters dislike. As a former head of communications for the Conservative Party, Ms Symonds will of course feel that she has a right to say something when she thinks 10 Downing Street is failing to communicate. Perhaps she does; but it is inescapable that, by pitching herself into the controversy, she will raise the temperature and turn more people against her husband-to-be.
No doubt the Test-and-tracers who “pinged” the Prime Minister at the weekend were only doing their job. If he was in contact with a colleague who subsequently tested positive, he must self-isolate. As Boris himself says, “The rules are the rules”.
But one must hope that there are rules about who applies the rules. If one knows that, by a well-aimed ping, one can lock up an important person for a fortnight, the temptation for some to do so will prove irresistible.
If I were running a trouble-making organisation such as Extinction Rebellion, I would infiltrate my activists into the NHS Test-and-trace system before you could say “Dido Harding”.