So is this really an exams ‘triumph’... or a cruel betrayal?
ICAN still remember when a set of English A-levels were regarded as the equal of an American college degree. That was the era when the USA plundered the products of British state schools, especially scientists, in a then-famous ‘brain-drain’ of talent across the Atlantic.
British academically selective grammar schools (Scotland had a similar system) totally outperformed the comprehensive high schools of the USA.
Then, in an action that might have been designed by our most bitter national enemies, we energetically destroyed almost all the grammar schools in the course of ten years between 1965 and 1975. Instead, we copied all the worst aspects of American education.
We built huge neighbourhood high schools where standards were lower in general, but a better education was available to those who could afford houses in wealthier areas. And the truly rich paid for private schools, which are not much better but find it easy to look good when compared with their state rivals. Crazily, this system, which privileged the better-off, was done in the name of equality.
Exams had to be diluted and inflated to cope with the change. Pre-1965 GCE O-levels were just too hard for many of the new comprehensives to cope with. So in 1975, the grades were massaged to hide fast-declining results. And, in the words of the Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter: ‘The government have now abolished the words “pass” and “fail” because they think it’s wrong to tell children they have failed.’ Eventually, the O-level was abolished entirely and replaced by the feeble GCSE.
The effect soon spread to A-levels, as the universities would discover when arriving students began to require remedial classes, simply to enable them to face the courses for which they were supposedly qualified. This couldn’t go on, so then we had the inflation of university degrees, made easier by the crazed university expansion of the Major and Blair years. In all cases, the victims have been the children. Why is it considered kind to hide this from them?
So now it has come full circle, a vicious backward circle. A British university degree is worth a good deal less than a set of A-levels would have been 60 years ago. As for A-levels, everyone knows the truth about this year’s results, which follow from the panic decision to close schools, one of the worst of all the Covid follies. They are a betrayal of those who taught and took them.
Yet what does the radical Leftwing elite that smashed up the grammar schools and still defends that action, say? Well, The Guardian, the newspaper of that elite, pronounced on Wednesday: ‘Yesterday’s outstanding set of A-level results represents an unalloyed triumph.’
Apparently, according to this organ, the 2021 A-level cohort has ‘emerged with its hopes and dreams intact’. Such commentary will make it almost impossible to undo the harm inflicted by this hyper-inflation. If people start pretending that these results were as good as they look, they are helping to delude the nation. How will proper standards be restored if the truth is not faced now? My guess is that the educational radicals, who have never much liked exams in the first place, will move on towards abolishing them completely on the grounds that this summer was ‘an unalloyed triumph’. Instead of vaguely objective tests, progress up the education ladder will from now on be a matter of opaque assessment, politically correct quotas and ‘social mobility’. The consequences of this, especially in demanding professions such as medicine, are frightening to contemplate.
The means to put this right are readily available if anyone wants to use them. When Communist East Germany collapsed in 1989, parents, finally free to speak, rebelled against its mainly comprehensive school system.
Politicians listened, and rebuilt the grammar schools the Communists had destroyed. To our political leadership, I say: Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Just admit that you don’t want to do it.