Not just unprepared for university, but for life

You don't need to be a 'tiger mother' to think most children are not being stretched enough

Christina Patterson in The Independent

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

They're usually blonde. They're usually these girls who whoop and leap for the cameras, blonde, and pretty, and thin. There must be some short, fat, spotty, and even male 18-year-olds who do so much better than they expected. Who do, in fact, so well that they behave as if they've won The X Factor, or the lottery. But usually it's girls, and blonde, pretty girls, who give us the message that A-level results are better than they've ever been before.

And they are. They always are. There were, last year, like the year before, and the year before, record numbers of A grades. Average scores have gone up by almost 25 per cent over 15 years. They're brilliant. They're amazing. They're just not, unfortunately, much of an indication of how much the people who took them have learnt.

You can, according to the Cambridge Assessment exam board, get the kind of results that make you whoop and leap, and still not know how to spell, or structure a sentence. You can, apparently, get the kind of results that make your parents proud, and still not know how to think. And because so many students can't spell, or think, universities are having to teach them. Sixty per cent of them are putting on extra courses to teach undergraduates what they should have learnt at school.

Perhaps it's not surprising that the man who's in charge of education in this country is a little bit worried. "I am increasingly concerned that current A-levels," said Michael Gove, in a letter to the exam regulator, "fall short of commanding the level of confidence we would want to see." It is, he said, "more important" that students start their degrees with "the right knowledge and skills" than that "ministers are able to influence the curriculum". He was, he said, going to hand control of the syllabus to exam boards and academic panels made up of senior dons. He hoped, he said, that the new A-levels would start in two years. He hoped, and so do I.

It's lovely, of course, to have so many pretty girls so happy to have done so well. But it isn't lovely that so many of them are struggling at university, and it isn't lovely that so many people with good GCSEs are having to be taught basic numeracy by employers shocked to find they can't add up. And it isn't lovely that this country is slipping down the world education league tables. In the last one, Britain had dropped to 25th place for reading, 28th for maths, and 16th for science. For the sixth biggest economy in the world, that doesn't sound all that good.

There are all kinds of reasons why standards have dropped. It would, for example, be quite strange for academic rigour in our schools to have increased at a time when academic rigour in our culture has shrunk. It would also be quite strange if schools that are judged on their performance in exam league tables didn't encourage their students into media studies or drama, rather than Mandarin or maths.

There were good reasons for widening the scope of subjects taught in schools, and giving more options to students who didn't look as though they were going to shine academically. It's surely better to leave school with a piece of paper saying you can do something than to leave with nothing at all. And there were good reasons for introducing league tables. If you want people to raise standards, you need them to show they have. But it does mean they're likely to focus less on learning, and more on results.

Whatever the intentions, the result has been that too many of our children aren't prepared for university, or life. The ones who are going to university aren't doing the subjects, like science or engineering, we need them to do if we don't want all our industries to go to China. The ones who aren't going to university aren't getting enough skills to do much at all. And if the ones who do go to university don't develop our industries, the ones who don't will be fighting for even fewer jobs.

"Children," said a man at a conference I went to last week, "aren't the problem. They are," he said, "very interested in anything that adults do. Teenagers," he said, "are desperate for direction. When they ask 'why should I do this?' you have two choices. Either walk out of the room, or tell them."
The conference was on "the manufacturing economy", and the man was a head of physics at a big South London comprehensive, called David Perks. They had, he said, managed to get 100 pupils to do A-level physics. There were, he said, equal numbers of girls and boys. Many of them, he said, were planning to go on and study engineering.

Educating children in a culture that doesn't seem to value academic achievement isn't easy. Nor is motivating them when, if they don't work, they won't starve. But you don't need to be a "tiger mother" to think that most of our children aren't being stretched enough. And, in an increasingly cut-throat global marketplace, it's our children who will suffer, not us.

Do we really believe the toffs who are running this country are brighter than the rest of us? Or that more money means a higher IQ? Do we really want state-educated pupils, who are 93 per cent of the population, to be let into the best educational institutions only through social engineering?
If we don't, we need to start believing that all our children can do better. And you don't help children do better by feeding them lies.

On Michael Gove's A level proposals - A new kind of class warfare

Michael Gove's A-level proposal will return us to the days when only the privileged were likely to go to university

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 April 2012 22.00 BST 
  • 
    

Gove, ‘who advocates rote-learning of poems and kings and queens of England, has always had a narrow conception of education'. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty

So Michael Gove, the education secretary, wants to give more power to academics at "top universities". This should be thrilling news, since coalition policy is swiftly morphing universities into business-driven degree mills, with lecturers feeling more powerless than they have in decades. Yet Gove's invitation to us to set A-levels has not set pulses racing. Few lecturers think A-levels in their present form prepare students well enough for university, or equip them to engage intelligently with the challenges of a complex world. A rethink would ordinarily be welcome. But this proposal will not achieve what it sets out to do.

Education cannot be overhauled in this typically top-down manner, with a select minority of institutions running the show at the expense of the sector as a whole. Like much else that characterises coalition higher education policy, this is a form of class warfare. A rigorous and challenging education is not magically effected simply by setting tougher questions or more essays – much as the modular answers of A-levels at present are to be deplored.

An equal opportunities education requires systemic attention and proper public funding, quite the opposite of coalition priorities. Critical thinking, intellectual curiosity and good writing must be taught from an early age, and made part of every citizen's skills. Gove's suggestion reduces them to instruments for enabling the better-supported to get into a good course. Turning A-levels into old-style Oxbridge entrance exams is consistent with the coalition's damaging and hierarchical attitude to education. Only a handful of well-coached clever clogs will enter a shrinking and expensive university sector.

Gove's proposal to limit the number of retakes also requires scrutiny. As any teacher knows, one-off exam results are not a fail-safe indicator of a student's abilities. Gove's emphasis on them as limited-opportunity tools for determining university entrance highlights the coalition's refusal to see education as a democratic necessity, a resource that should be widely and equally available as a public good.

While it would be productive for schoolteachers and academics across the sector to share ideas about the content and evaluation of school curriculums, it is wrong to suggest that exams can be set by people not directly involved with the teaching of them. At Cambridge we spend much attention on ensuring that the exams we set are fair and enable a wide range of answers in relation to the teaching we provide, but the questions are not instrumental – nor do we teach solely with exams in mind. Schoolteachers, not lecturers, should be the driving force behind A-levels. What Gove calls "university ownership" of A-levels is a euphemism for the managerialism that is already part of the problem. Asking some universities to "drive the system" from a distance threatens to throw everyone else off the vehicle.

Our challenging times call for a richly resourced educational system that equips young people across social classes to develop their intellectual and creative abilities. Jobs and degrees are vital – but so, in a democracy, is the ability to think ideas through at length, make informed judgments, critically evaluate alternatives and argue a case. Would a government that is busily pushing through changes with no real mandate really want to encourage this?

Gove, who advocates rote-learning of poems and kings and queens of England, has always had a narrow conception of education. His proposal returns us to the bad old days when only the privately educated and well-funded could go to university. In tandem with tripled tuition fees, a funding regime that weakens the arts and humanities, and the likely privatisation of many universities, the already privileged will be the only winners.