As exam results come out, remember - it's not how intelligent you are, but how you are intelligent that counts

In the drive for improving education effectiveness and efficiency, it is tempting to ‘keep it simple’ and seek one yardstick to measure success and drive up standards. After all, that is how the quest for profit has driven success in business. So, if we take education, what should be the ‘bottom line’? Exam grades seem like a good idea, especially if there are different levels corresponding to different ages and stages of learning. Grades are a great incentive: the higher the level and the grades, the greater the ‘intelligence’ and thus the probability of success for students and the ‘better’ and thus the probability of success for schools, colleges and universities.

But let us just imagine what would really happen the greater the importance we attached to grades:
As a parent, the more you would do anything to get your child into a so-called ‘good’ school which guaranteed high grades (e.g. pay through the nose, change house, change religion, private tuition).
As a student, the more you thought you were not going to be in the top half and ‘make the grade’, the more you’d lose motivation and stop trying (after all you wouldn’t want to try hard and fail – better to be lazy or disaffected or attention-deficient than ‘thick’ ).
As an educational institution, if you were in charge of a school with below average results, the more you’d be tempted to teach to the test and focus on your ‘marginal constituents’ at the expense of the others.
And as a government, you’d do anything to show that standards are rising – and so no one would believe you, even if they were. You would find yourself sucked into an increasingly resource-sapping bureaucratic maelstrom trying to match totally different learnings and qualifications, to increase transparency and rigor in marking, to devise yet more carrots and sticks to ensure appropriate behaviour, to monitor performance and devise league tables…and so on.

Overall my bet is that it would be the ‘rich wot gets the pleasure and the poor wot gets the blame’, or in other words social mobility would decline.

In other words, it would be a system doomed to fail - and we see the consequences all around us. Don’t get me wrong, I believe strongly in competition and in measurement. BUT do not borrow from business and over-simplify measures in the public/social sphere - and in education do not measure success by how intelligent you are, but rather by how you are intelligent.