Oh boy, now we have secondary school headteachers wanting to appeal the GCSE results because some of them are too high. That sounds like a contradiction in terms but the concern is that students will be set up to fail, persuaded onto inappropriate courses post-GCSE. As I understand it, the problem is caused by the decision to let students have whichever grade was higher: the teacher assessed grade or the algorithm grade. But because GCSE exams are taken at two levels, foundation or higher, and because foundation level entries are grade restricted, the algorithm has given some students a grade they simply could not have achieved because their entry level did not permit it.
As various pop singers could tell the government, THERE IS NO EASY WAY OUT!
Whether or not the fact that the company that worked with Ofqual to devise the strategy for coping with the algorithm and the grades problem was one previously used by Gove and Cummings made any difference is an unknown factor. What is true is that they got the contract without it having been put out to tender.
Shades of government by “who do we know who can do this job”. I am reminded of the really badly translated menus you come across in restaurants abroad, where the translation job has been given to someone’s cousin who “used to be good at English in school”.
In Spain they call that kind of thing “enchufe”, being plugged in or having connections. Here I suppose we call it jobs for the boys.
So it goes!
Someone called Bidisha, a broadcaster, critic and journalist apparently, has been writing in the Guardian about her difficulty in concentrating on reading during the lockdown.
“I know I’m not the only one.” she writes. “Despite the looming date of 3 September – the fated Thursday on which hundreds of new books will be published, all at the same time, to fail by Christmas – nobody I know is reading anything. Sustained concentration is impossible. I’ve finished one book during lockdown; it was by Danielle Steel and it was fantastic. It was about an ordinary middle-American woman who works at a printing company, gets obsessed with a Downton Abbey-like show, moves to England, gets work on the show, marries the guy who owns the castle that features on it, and by the end is a marchioness.”
She has resorted to comfort watching Downton Abbet and the like, abandoning books for the time being. Which is odd as I have made my way through some quite heavy reading and so have a number of my friends, judging by the notes we exchange. We also exchange notes on interesting box sets to watch, mostly foreign detective series. There is life beyond Downton Abbey!
Some of the books I have been reading are quite literally heavy. Hilary Mantel’s tomes are quite enormous. And I am currently reading Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, three books in one volume. Books of this size are not the sort of thing to read in bed. If you fell asleep reading and the book fell on your head it could do some serious damage. It might even prove fatal. Consequently my bedtime reading has consisted of the collected works of Donna Leon, detective stories set in Venice. These are lightweight paperbacks which do me no harm if I drop them on my head. And they have the added charm of the tales taking place in a city I am reasonably familiar with. I have read them all before but so long ago that the details have slipped away.
One I just finished - they last quite well as I only read for a short time before settling down to sleep - involved works of art stolen from or sold by rich folk who needed to escape from Italy during the Second World War. Coincidentally I came across a report about a painting stolen by the Nazis wartime France:
“A 19th-century oil painting stolen from Nazi-occupied France during the second world war has gone on display in an attempt to trace its rightful owners, after being returned by the son of the German soldier who was ordered to take it.
After 76 years in Germany, the small untitled artwork by the French painter Nicolas Rousseau is back in France and being exhibited at the World Centre for Peace, Liberty and Human Rights in the north-eastern town of Verdun.
Next to it hangs a sign that reads: “If you recognise the landscape or have any information about this painting, we would be grateful if you would let us know.”
Philippe Hansch, the director of the centre, brought the painting back from Berlin by car at the beginning of August.
For the past fortnight it has hung in the lobby of the centre, which receives 60,000 visitors a year, in the hope it will nudge someone’s memory and lead the painting back to its owners or their heirs.
“The painting is a big symbol of Franco-German friendship and allows the history of World War II to be told with fresh eyes from the French side and German side,” he said.”
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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