Mike Tomlinson is reportedly upset; education select committee chairman Barry Sheerman says it is a “tragedy”. The Secondary Heads Association is lamenting this “lost opportunity”. Cambridge University, more moderately but more surprisingly, is “disappointed”. The CBI and the IOD seem to be the only organisations supporting Ruth Kelly’s news last week that GCSEs and A-levels should survive.
The fact is Tomlinson never had a chance. His report recommending that GCSEs and A-levels should be replaced by four interlocking diplomas was always going to be dumped. On the day it was published the prime minister went on the offensive, declaring that existing examinations were to be retained. Of course. Blair has a passion for education. He was never going to approve recommendations that would have secured his place in history as the prime minister who killed off the A-level examination that once glistened as the symbol of all that was excellent in British education.
Who took the decision, and why, is, in the end, irrelevant. The important thing is that there is now a chance that standards in secondary education can be raised. Exams matter. They define expectations of student performance. They motivate students and teachers. They identify the schools that are succeeding and those that are failing.
But, as Kelly admitted, GCSEs and A-levels are not what they were. The gold no longer glistens. There has, she said, to be “stretch”. Translated, this means “more challenging questions for the brightest students”, teenagers taking degree course modules while still at school and “tougher” GCSE exams in English and maths so that “in future nobody will be able to get a higher grade” in these subjects “without mastering the basics ”.
Some commentators have swooned in admiration. Personally, I despair at a culture that expects us to applaud the proposal that an A grade in English will depend upon mastery of the full stop.
The rudiments of punctuation should be taught in the early years of the primary school, not GCSE courses. Why, moreover, do bright sixth formers need to study degree modules? If the curriculum and assessment procedures of A-levels were made more demanding, there would be plenty of “stretch”.
We did not need tokenism of this kind in my 1960s grammar school. I can still remember the intellectual excitement. “What”, our history teacher, Peter Teed, asked, “were the real causes of the English civil war?” And we were off, debating the merits of economic, religious and constitutional explanations. I loved those discussions, and I hate the opportunism of politicians more interested in a new initiative making headlines than in anything that might be called education.
Stretch! The absurdity of the word says it all. What is going on in Ruth Kelly’s head? Or Tony Blair’s? We are going, Kelly said in the Commons, to “move from a system of comprehensive schools to a genuinely comprehensive system of education”. And, a moment later: “Mr Speaker, I believe that every child has equal worth. That every child has potential. That the job of the education system is to develop and extend that potential.”
How much is she paid? How long have Labour been in power? How much longer are we to be patronised in this excruciating way? The charitable explanation for this failure to connect mouth to brain is that Ruth Kelly is not really interested in stretching the academically gifted child. The problem, she thinks, is the “majority” the education system fails, not the “high-achieving elite” which can, presumably, be left to go on achieving as highly as it ever did.
I wish, but set that problem to one side for the moment. Her answer to the problem of the great unwashed who, in her words, are “unattractive to employers; deficient in the basics of English and maths; unprepared for further study; and unable to develop their full potential”, is to cajole those who have failed in school for 11 years to sign up for another two.
Ninety per cent of students in Kelly’s new educational dawn are going to stay on to 18. The 70,000 (her figure) who leave school each year “weak in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic” will be taught to read, write and add up.
New “specialised vocational diplomas” in 14 “broad subject areas” are to be developed. The first four, in ICT, engineering, health and social care, and the creative and media industries will be available by 2008. Four more will be on stream by 2010; the rest by 2015.
Why it will take so long to develop these courses I don’t know. If Kelly were to be asked how they were going to differ from the GNVQs upon which previous hopes of vocational training have been pinned, I suspect she would not know what to say. Where are the teachers who are going to have to teach them to be found? In principle what she is saying is right. There is a desperate need for vocational alternatives to the academic curriculum. But we have known this for years. I said as much to David Blunkett and Tony Blair in 1997. By now the courses should be in place. The tragedy is the time and £1m wasted on Tomlinson’s doomed odyssey.
The good news is that the right decision has been taken. The notion that locking every 14 to 19-year-old into the same basic diploma would immediately make vocational courses as attractive as academic ones has been rejected.
Vocational courses will gain credibility when they are credible. They have, obviously, to lead to worthwhile employment. They must be given their own identity, different from that of academic courses but equally valuable. It is not beyond man’s wit to develop such courses. Now the ground has been cleared, it might even happen.
Kelly is right, moreover, to say that the curriculum in the early years of secondary education should be freed up so that those who cannot read and write can master these basic skills. If she reads the latest research and ignores her officials, she may even see that a revised National Literacy Strategy that emphasised teaching phonics in infant classrooms would solve the problem at a stroke.
And she may realise that the sensible thing would be to lower the school leaving age, not raise it.
Sixteen-year-olds who associate school with failure are not going to respond to another two years of humiliation. The burning problem facing our education service is not that so many young people “drop out” at 16. It is that they drop, barely educated, into nothing. If she raised standards in primary schools and introduced apprenticeships for disaffected 14-year-olds, the education secretary would earn a place in the history books. Wherever the prime minister ends up.
