Nathan Brooker’s Weblog

Just as the grubby young hope of the nation is preparing to collectively bike down to their school to pick up their GCSE results, the government are busy working out names to call the schools that have not faired so well…

Last week it was the turn of the ‘boffs’ – the A level students who did so well that obviously the exams were getting easier and that their ‘A’ grades were about as valuable as if they’d fished them out of a can of Alphabety Spaghetti.

Now this week, despite predictions that record numbers will achieve good marks (at least 5 grades, including Maths and English, marked between A*-C), the government are busy cooking up some pithy epithets for the insufferably thick.

Schools that achieve fewer than the standard 30% of ‘good marks’ (yes, that’s at least 5 grades, including Maths and English, marked between A*-C) are to be labelled “Failing”. I’m not sure whether this will be written over the iron gates in great gothic letters along with something like “Abandon All Hope “, but I doubt very much it’ll be grafted onto 150 balloons and tied in clusters to every available ledge or sill.

Now, before the party gets underway, may I ask how exactly this is supposed to help matters? I mean, ‘Naming and Shaming’ doesn’t have the most successful record does it? That’s how you end up with Paediatricians’ practices getting their windows bricked through.

Calling schools “failing” will do two things: One, it will discourage the more discerning parents from sending their children there; and two, it will hardly give the underachieving kids a shot in the arm will it? Telling some 14 year old boy he’s a failure will hardly tear him away from his ‘extra curricular’ pursuits and get him to go back to his revision: Nobody, absolutely nobody, reads Collins’ History of Geography for the articles.

Of course, this being a neatly soundbitten age, some bright spark has hit upon the ‘third way’. This new path consists of more vocational courses and more ‘problem solving’ (as opposed to memory based) questions in exam scripts. This is in response to the fact that some kids dislike learning because they see it only as a way to ‘get better at learning’; a sort of ‘learning for learning’s sake’ conundrum (oh dear, sorry to get back onto this masturbatory topic but they definitely started it sir, honest). Indeed, one commentator even likened it to ‘working out one’s learning muscle’ and that if someone is good at remembering the formula for glucose, then they’ll be equally good at remembering the order of King Henry VIII wives… or the different types of cloud formation or all the lyrics to Hurricane by Bob Dylan or the order of a deck of playing cards or… well, you get the picture.

An attractive point perhaps; but then they obviously never heard that memory is said to be the mother of the muses. Nor, it would seem, does this impart ‘knowledge’ any actual worth at all. If you directly equate the knowledge that a glucose molecule is comprised of six carbon atoms, 12 hydrogen atoms and six oxygen atoms, or that ice takes up more space than water (and why) or that earthquakes are caused by shifting tectonic plates or that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, with the order of a deck of cards then you really are a ‘failure’… a failure and a complete arse too. To think that the Education System in this country is a matter of passing exams and not ‘being taught’ anything is ludicrous and not just a little offensive. I mean, if you are prepared to think that learning is a self-perpetuating party trick then you’re completely ignoring the entire history of human endeavour; Plato to Hawking, alpha to omega, ace to king.   

Instead of spending time piecing together insults, perhaps the government should invest more money and man hours in schools, teaching and equipment and, while they’re at it, they could do a lot worse than stopping ploughing funds into carrying out countless national exams and paying incompetent American companies to mark them… and get everyone’s grades wrong as they do.

Ed Balls: D-

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