Where is the credibility in not giving poorer kids fair chance?

HAVE you ever watched a toddler trying to put their own clothes on?

The child, desperate to assert its independence, valiantly attempts to dress itself becomingly, keen to prove something. Prove what? We’ll never know.

Despite repeated warnings that the clothes are inside out and back-to-front, the child persists in a mad exhibition of determination and foolishness.

But their efforts, no matter how admirable, are almost always unavailing – the kid usually ties itself in knots before falling flat on its face.

As I watched Education Secretary John Swinney defending the SQA’s decision to downgrade nearly a quarter of all pupil’s exam results, it put me in mind of my two-year-old trying to pull on a onesie.

I felt a mix of sympathy and frustration as he threw his weight behind a technocratic methodology which, at its core, disadvantages those very pupils against whom the scales have always been tipped.

The justification was, apparently, to preserve the “credibility” of the system.

It was felt that, by marking grades down, that our qualifications authority would remain credible in the eyes of upstanding, socially responsible employers such as Amazon and Sports Direct, bedwetting opinion columnists who’ve never worked a day in their lives, and universities that just progressed thousands of west end stoners into second and third year off the back of two months of ropey course work.

That so many school kids from deprived backgrounds might receive such good grades was deemed unrealistic. The Scottish Government’s fear is that by exhibiting good faith (and handing down the grades estimated by teachers rather than digits churned out by an algorithm), we might bring about a dystopia where a lot of people appear smarter on paper than they are in real life.

That such a judgemnt was reached by bureaucrats and politicians is extremely ironic. Though perhaps not more ironic than the suggestion that teachers marking their pupils overgenerously might throw the entire system into disrepute – like nobody from a posh background ever got a hand up they didn’t earn.

If the results leapt up by a massive amount this year, as was feared, what is the worst that could happen?

Surely, middle class people shouldn’t be the only ones walking around with an unrealistically high opinion of themselves?

All jokes aside, at its core, this is a simple question of fairness – does the system derive its “credibility” from giving poorer kids a decent crack of the whip or by preserving the historical inequalities that have come to define it?

In choosing the latter as its course of action, the Scottish Government is asserting that the many advantages enjoyed by the most affluent pupils are fine – it’s any suggestion that the scale might be tipped in favour of the poorest kids that’s the real problem.

Inequality that benefits the wealthy is OK, anything that may upend the educational repression of poorer kids is dangerous.

Defenders of the Government claim that by going with the teachers’ estimates, the attainment gap would narrow artificially – like the grades of the kids who go to the “best” schools are not inflated by the favourable socioeconomic circumstances in which they are achieved.

This speaks to the wider issue at play.

During this pandemic, millions of middle-class professionals, landlords and business owners have been bailed-out by Government. Health professionals have been fast-tracked into work.

Governments have gone to extreme lengths to lighten the load of lockdown on society’s winners – but working-class kids possibly getting a B when they should have gotten a C could tear the fabric of the spacetime continuum, apparently.

Sorry Swinney – it’s a big fat “F” from me.