"Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker." Stanley Kubrick

It’s all about GCSE results this week. Edge recently surveyed 1,000 15 to 16 year olds studying GCSEs in England. Make of the results what you will:

• More than half of GCSE students (56 per cent) are uninspired by at least three of the subjects studied and 41 per cent are uninspired by at least four subjects (half of the average eight subjects taken).

• Disinterest in a subject impacts directly on study performance – 46 per cent admitted they revise less for subjects that don’t motivate them, 40 per cent switch off in class and 30 per cent feel stressed studying for these exams.

• Two thirds of the students polled (66 per cent) said their talents would have been better developed with a wider range of ‘hands on’ learning through practical and vocational courses.
• A majority (57 per cent) believe everyone should study at least one practical and vocational subject (e.g. engineering or hospitality) as well as academic subjects like English and maths.

• If a wider choice of subjects were delivered, 87 per cent said they feel they would have been better prepared for a job and 89 per cent say they would have more chance of finding what they are good at. A wider choice of subjects would also mean 73 per cent would stop feeling they have only been taught to test.

• Three quarters (73 per cent) would like to be taught by external experts alongside their teachers.

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.

Where applied learning is everyone's business

I've blogged previously about the excellent practical and vocational learning going on at Ashfield School. So, I'm delighted to see the glowing, in-depth feature in today's TES. Definitely worth a read!

August hand-wringing and tail-wagging

Our national obsession with meaningless marks is hobbling any serious attempt to reform the UK education system.

There was an excellent start to the education pantomime season (rising standards; “oh yes they are...”, or dumbing down; “oh no they’re not...”) last Saturday by Peter Wilby in the Guardian. He wrote:

“The truth is that classifications and grades carry neither educational value nor useful information. They do not test a specific body of knowledge or skill. No serious qualification bothers with grading; they assure the public that professionals or skilled workers possess particular competencies. Degree classes and exam grades are rationing devices, regulating access either to the next stage of education or to professional occupations.

He went on to suggest that exam grades and degree classifications should be abolished and replaced by "achievement reports", detailing what students know, what skills they have acquired, whether they are better at theoretical than practical work, and so on. Incidentally, this all sounds pretty similar to Step 2 of Edge’s Six Steps for Change Manifesto.

Commenting on the inflationary spiral of educational grades he noted that “the main reason is that we want greater numbers to go to university". Actually, the only inflationary spiral we can be sure of as GCSE and A-level results come out in the next two weeks, is the rise in the number of appeals against given grades. However, he is right; essentially we have an assembly line grading system designed either to reject you as sub-standard or allow you to carry on to the next stage - the final product being someone who is ‘qualified’ to do a traditional university degree.

The tail is wagging the dog!

A week in the press – the critical importance of vocational routes

On Sunday the Telegraph reported that the Awarding Body OCR had sent a letter to Ofqual warning them about the new Diplomas: “Exam board poised to withdraw from ‘poor man’s A-level’ Diplomas.” Apparently the letter spoke of ‘a fundamental difficulty in creating a qualification that is both work-related and academic’. What poppycock! A fundamental difficulty for whom?! The most powerful and successful qualifications for over a century, and the true ‘gold standard’, have been both work-related and academic – professional qualifications. The fundamental difficulty is that, as the recent social mobility reports highlight, these have traditionally been the ‘rich man’s qualifications’ because entry has often been restricted to those who excel academically from the top academic private schools.

On Tuesday David Willetts wrote a terrific article in the Guardian about young people from disadvantaged backgrounds not having low aspirations, just less information and guidance on the options. He also went on to advocate much better vocational routes into University. Now that starts to address the fundamental difficulty. Well done David!

He might well have been taking his inspiration from Coventry University’s Vice-Chancellor, Madeleine Atkins, who was interviewed for the Independent on Thursday. She has reinvented the university by reviewing every degree programme and course to ensure they were in-line with the skills and knowledge required by the regional and national economy. In addition, enterprise and entrepreneurship have been introduced to all students. So Coventry University don’t seem to have ‘a fundamental difficulty’ (but then OCR are owned by Cambridge University). I have met very many senior people over the past few years who advocate bringing back the Polytechnics. Actually what we want is more Coventry Universities. Why can’t we establish a brand that signifies a really high-quality vocational university? Where are the vocational Oxbridges?

Meanwhile that nightmare called the Gifted and Talented programme is changed for the third time in seven years because the £42m invested in it is not having much impact. Apparently (I have just read this in Friday’s TES and not yet checked with original sources) the emphasis will now be on getting more teenagers from deprived families into ‘top universities’. Of course they probably won’t go through vocational routes because ‘gifted and talented’ only means academically ‘gifted’ (sic!) or talented in art, music and sport. Outrageous! I have a better idea – just scrap the whole programme.