By Isle of Wight Observer
I’ve been lucky to have a lovely week’s holiday in Kent; I noticed several things. There is a lot more traffic (and litter), the roads are even worse than ours and they have a lot more apples. The cost of living crisis is just as keen, but on the Island, it’s not just prices are that subject to inflation. Our MP, Bob Seely, is ‘inflating’ his achievements – to the point you’d believe we’ve never had it so good. Despite admitting he can only focus on one issue at a time, he has inflated the time he spends on the Island to the whole of August, which comes as a great relief to many.
One area not experiencing inflation is exam grades; quite the opposite, they are experiencing deflation. This is the first cohort of students to have suffered all the effects on education of Covid and reduced funding, yet none of the benefits of the sensible approach taken to exam grades over the last three years.
I know there will be a solid group of people saying “Exams are supposed to be hard; in my day, we weren’t allowed calculators, or chairs, and had to remember our 27 times table and if your pencil wasn’t sharp enough to pierce a tank, you didn’t deserve to pass.” I don’t disagree that exams should be challenging and test your knowledge of the subject matter, especially in technical or medical subjects. The issue we are seeing isn’t that the difficulty (and therefore the understanding required to pass) has increased, but the marks you need to get a particular grade have just changed. If 60 per cent represented a grade 7 last year, it might only equal a grade 6 this year. Grade deflation doesn’t seem fair, as your knowledge is no less than last year’s exam takers.
At the other end of the scale, around 30 per cent of pupils have to fail to make the marking system ‘work’ because that’s how statistics work, but if you ask any teacher (like in the previous three years), grades aren’t the full picture. The ability to get on with others, try when they don’t succeed first time, and overcome other issues, are just as valuable – more so in some cases.
It should come as no surprise that children from less privileged backgrounds are nearly twice as likely to fail GCSE maths than their wealthier classmates. The Education Secretary said your results won’t matter in 10 years as no one will ask about them. That may be true, but those results define what happens next. In a labour market that is crying out for people in all sectors at all levels, it’s extremely valid for students to question the relevance of the current exam system.
On the subject of education, much has been said about the fantastic football the Lionesses played in Australia – absolutely gripping, though if it is to be referred to as the Women’s World Cup, the other one should be known as the Men’s World Cup.
After the final, the Prime Minister and many public figures talked of their legacy and how it has inspired girls everywhere (I’m not sure why not boys too, but that’s a different article) to take up sport.
Many commentators have bemoaned the lack of sport in school (typically no more than 100 mins a week). The reason is simple.
We have a government that doesn’t value anything other than money. Sport could be as valuable as maths if we wanted it to be, but that wins cups, not votes.