Friday 12 September 2014

Plus ça change!

In between getting grandchildren organised for school - bags packed, homework done and in bags, lunch or snack sorted - driving grandchildren here and there, feeding grandchildren, walking the puppy, making sure the puppy is fed and watered and that someone has taken him outside to do what puppies need to do, I have snatched the odd moment to read bits of the newspaper. 

That is how I came across the headline "GCSE changes may cut top grades". My heart sank. They want to tinker with the system again. There is this desperate terror that too many pupils are achieving the A* grade. Well, I've thought that for a while but if you set up league tables and judge teachers on the exam results of their pupils, they will usually find a way of teaching TO the exam, improving exam techniques and one way or another pushing up the percentage of top grades in their classes. 

The other thing is that there is a lot of concern about our place in the PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment - ratings. We don't do very well. I wonder if instituting a grading system which they consider compatible with the PISA systems will improve our students performance. Anyway, they want to institute a new grading system: 1 to 9 instead of A* to G. 

At first I thought they were reverting to the grading system that was around when I did O- levels, more years ago than I care to confess to. But that's not quite the case. This time 1 will be the lowest grade possible and 9 the highest, contrary to most other grading systems I have come across, except possibly music exams for playing an instrument. 

Either way, it's a different way of grading to what is in place at the moment. And it will not be possible to award the very top grade to as high a percentage of students as goes on at the moment with A* grades. So the emphasis has changed from getting as many high grades as possible to demonstrating that we have a strict and realistic assessment programme in place. Wasn't that what they really wanted to have already. I suspect we are seeing a lot of political manoeuvring and career tweaking. 

It's bad enough when you have work out the approximate equivalent grades from a previous system with the ones from an old system. It's got some of that "comparing chalk with cheese" aspect about it. However, this new grading system will exist side by side with the old one for a while. Only Maths, English Language and English Literature will change initially, although the rest will follow at a later date. So some students will have two different types of grades on their certificates. I feel sorry for the employers who will have to make head or tail of the grades and for the teachers who will have to deal with administering the system and explaining to parents why little Billy isn't getting the top grade. But most all I feel sorry for the poor kids who are being used as guinea pigs once more in this ongoing educational politicking!! 

Rant over! I've got a puppy to walk.

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