Thanks to New Labour, anybody can get in to Uni.
And thanks to that charlatan Gove, the new, allegedly more robust A levels will have made no difference at all.
Here’s why: concerns about grade inflation resulted in new syllabuses getting devised and implemented very much on the hoof. In the subject that I taught, so much additional, superfluous and dull content was introduced that I had to adopt a cramming approach from day one in order to get through everything in 5 terms. This not only took the joy out of classroom teaching but also deprived my students of opportunities to engage in the type of evaluative, logical and lateral thinking that is essential in order to access the highest grades.
Additionally, the terminal examinations could include questions about anything on the course. For example, the summer 2019 paper included a question on the ethics of something called ‘PGD’ or Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis. This is a form of IVF that includes screening for devastating childhood illnesses like Tay-Sachs.
As it happens, it is a topic that know a fair bit about. However, the only textbook for the new course that had been published up to that point contained all of two sentences on this specific variation of IVF. And my students were expected to write for 30 minutes on the subject.
Fortunately, a few of them sussed out what it was and were able to improvise.They did okay. But the weaker ones were left high and dry. And none at all received the benefit of my extra knowledge because there was no time to impart it and I did not anticipate the possibility that there would be a substantial question on such a small bit of the syllabus. Fortunately, the students also still did well overall so I did not leave teaching with a poor set of results with this final cohort.
You may at this point be wondering where all this is leading. Well, because the new courses were introduced in such a cack-handed fashion, the examinations were marked extremely generously. So the upshot of it all was that students ended up with pretty much the same grades that they might have received had they studied the content of the older A level courses.
So what Gove (abetted by that other idiot Cummings who was assisting him at the time) effectively did was to introduce reforms that must have cost millions and have bequeathed to the nation a vastly inferior qualification.
The same is also true when it comes to GCSE.
There’s one other thing: more than four years after these new courses were phased in far too prematurely, there are still no adequate textbooks covering some aspects of the content for my subject. I am a published author and very well-placed to fill the gap now that I am semi-retired. However, I figured out that it would take me about four years to produce something half-decent, a project that I am disinclined to undertake because - as I have already mentioned - much of the ground I would have to cover is balls achingly boring.
In summary, whatever problems New Labour have created as far as our education system is concerned have been vastly compounded since.
There’s one other related issue that is worth a mention : Gove also made it easier to get rid of incompetent teachers. That may sound all well and good, but again the view from the inside is different. What actually happened was that cash strapped senior management used this new system to get rid of the older, more expensive members of staff, precisely the ones with the expertise to deliver the new syllabuses.
Okay, rant over. But just in case anyone is wondering, I taught in the independent sector for two decades and therefore avoided the aforementioned cull. I was also able to walk away from the classroom a bit earlier because I was could draw on personal savings in order to do so.
I realise that I have digressed here but someone needs to point out how much worse the system has become. And so if I was a parent with bright kids who have yet to sit A levels, I might start to see if any schools in the area offer the IB qualification as an alternative to A levels, as it is, for my money, a superior qualification that encourages independent thought and the cultivation of skills that are essential for university study, qualities that teenagers might not otherwise get to develop because there is simply no time for them to do so because of Gove’s inept reforms.