What on earth has happened to education in the UK? Every day it looks more like a train wreck. Of course as a former grammar school girl, I regret the disappearance of what were once the finest schools in the country, better than most contemporary private schools and absolutely free of charge to anyone intelligent enough to profit from them. But the disappearance of grammar schools now seems to me to be the least of the catastrophes that have befallen British education. And some of the worst decisions made over the years are the least known
For example, how many people know the difference between absolute and relative grading in public examinations? The switch away from relative grading (also known as grading on the curve) lies at the root of many present-day problems. Yet I don’t remember any great debate about it when it was abolished. Like quite a few other unwelcome changes, it can be placed at the door of Margaret Thatcher, another former grammar school girl who should have known better.
The old system was based on a curve which showed how many candidates should be allocated to each grade. Markers initially graded each paper separately on its perceived merits, but then they had to adjust their marks to fit the curve. If, for example, there were too many Grade B’s, the best and worst of these had to be re-examined to see if they perhaps belonged in Grade A or Grade C. We were often told by our teachers that if your paper was really Grade A material, it wouldn’t matter if your handwriting or spelling was below par, but that if there was any doubt about whether you had made the grade, these things might determine the outcome. So we were encouraged to write neatly and spell correctly.
Grading on the curve had three obvious advantages:
But then some people started to say that it was “unfair” that someone should be marked down simply because that year was unusually rich in high quality candidates. Shouldn’t each candidate be marked purely on personal merit? Actually the argument was largely hypothetical since there was no mechanism that might produce big year-on-year swings in the overall quality of the candidates. But it sounded like a moral argument, a matter of fairness. So in 1984 (ominous year!) relative marking was abolished.
This, simply by itself and without any other changes, might not have done too much harm, apart from the obvious unfairness of exposing candidates to uncontrollable variation in the generosity of the markers. But it was accompanied by two other changes which made for a lethal combination: the advent of grades for schools as well as for exam takers, and the creation of a liberalised market in exam papers. Both changes were due to Thatcher’s conviction that free competition is the answer to everything.
Actually there are many situations in which free and open competition leads to a race to the bottom rather than to the top. Giving schools a direct rather than an indirect interest in the success of their pupils has encouraged collusion between schools and pupils to game the exams. I have a theory that honest dealing in any kind of business often depends on the participants having opposed interests. For example, if I want to buy an antique, then I want the real thing, but it may be in the interests of the other party to sell me a fake. So I shall be watchful if the price seems suspiciously low or if I have heard that fake goods are currently on the market. Equally the seller will want to ensure that I can pay for what he is selling me and that my cheque will not bounce before he hands anything over. In other words, we will police each other.
When I took my public exams, my school policed the candidates to ensure that we did not cheat. It did so reliably because nobody on the staff had any interest in cheating. This is no longer the case. One hears numerous accounts by pupils who failed an examination and resat it with a teacher beside them, who virtually dictated the correct answers. But that is nothing compared to the way that “free and open competition” in the supply of examination papers has legalised school-based cheating and turned it into an industry.
There was a time when schools got their exam papers from the nearest university. For example, London schools like mine used University of London papers. Many northern schools got their papers from the Northern Universities Joint Matriculation Board. Allowing producers of exam papers to compete for custom across the whole of the UK might possibly have worked if marking had still been on the curve, because the competition then could only have been in price. But with absolute marking, schools could ensure their own success (and consequent high grades in the inter-school competition) by shopping around for the easiest papers they could find. Suppliers soon learned that the way to sell their papers was to make them easier rather than cheaper. The result is that our exam system has become an international laughing stock.
Tony Blair inherited Margaret Thatcher’s educational “reforms” and made hay with them! “Education, education, education!” was his motto. Year by year, O-level and A-level passes rose and Blair took the credit. It all just went to show how marvellous our education system was. Any suggestion that the grades were artificially inflated was met by a furious accusation that the complainant was trying to do down the brave efforts of British schoolchildren. They deserved their high grades, for which they had worked hard. Absolute marking had inevitably turned the results into a personal reward rather than a way of classifying candidates for different types of work or education.
From time to time, some newspaper or think tank would test adolescent volunteers with O-level or A-level questions from the 50’s or 60’s. Often they could not answer a single question properly. But all such tests were pooh-poohed by the educational experts as proving nothing of value. The fact that the UK has drifted lower and lower in respected international comparisons has likewise been ignored.
Of course, something had to be done to provide university places for all these young geniuses with their bundles of Grade A A-level certificates. When I was young, the only universities that existed were what is now called Russell Group universities, and they had places for only about 5% of each year. They provided an academically challenging education for this top 5%, while other grammar school pupils went on to polytechnics, teacher training colleges and other institutes of further education, or into apprenticeships or the civil service. Blair wanted 50% of young people to go to “uni” so he reclassified all the polytechnics as universities. Formerly excellent institutions that had provided good engineering or business degrees suddenly changed their names and started to offer degrees in critical race theory, gender studies and media studies. Obviously these provide no qualification or training for any kind of useful work, so young people are increasingly going to university for the experience and not for qualifications.
Then came the pandemic. With many children getting very little education and no possibility of sitting formal exams, clearly something had to be done about the summer O-levels and A-levels. The first proposed solution was to start with teachers’ evaluations and use an algorithm to correct them, based on the school’s previous successes (or otherwise). Of course it was soon pointed out that the schools whose marks would be systematically downgraded were those that poorer working-class children were most likely to attend, while pupils at private schools would be marked up. The whole project suddenly became politically toxic. So the algorithmic correction was scrapped and the teachers’ evaluations were used uncorrected. The result was the biggest grade inflation of all time.
We have had this for two years now. God help the students who take the next lot of exams in 2022 and find themselves in competition for university places with the huge overflow of unexamined candidates from 2020 and 2021. The only hope we now have for a correction is that people will finally realise what a mess we have made of the whole examination system in the name of greater “fairness” and return to a system that actually fulfills its function.