Tag Archives: A-level

GCSE results: Were exams traditionally DOWNgraded for non-private/grammar school pupils?

Exams: they didn’t happen this year or in 2020, and under teacher assessments, grades shot up. And after last year’s results, assessments by independent/grammar school teachers shot up further than those by teachers in state schools. Are millions of pupils, past and present, the victims of a national downgrading scam?

This Site received a very interesting – and worrying – comment on this year’s A-level results which I want to share with you.

It said:

“Surely, the BIG story is that this year probably reveals that lots more pupils should have done well in previous years, as well as in this year, but the exam system deliberately DOWNGRADED pupils so that numbers and quotas for college places etc would not be exceeded.

“In reality, before now, many pupils would have done well enough for a University place but, given a lack of enough places, the exam results were “doctored by algorithm” so that, by some mysterious process, the number of suitable pupils was almost exactly the number of college places available!

“The remnant 11-plus system in Kent or Glos works in the same way, producing enough pupils to fill the Grammar school places available, but then “failing” many others who, in other years, would have “passed” with exactly the same exam results.

“But this year, the teachers just made honest assessments of pupil progress and achievements and did not consider things like deliberately downgrading some results so that college places would not be under pressure.

“The big losers are , surely, the thousands of pupils in previous years who did just as well as this year’s, but were then downgraded to mean that they no longer hoped to go on to University.

“Public school kids, like Clarkson, didn’t have to worry about all this as they were set up for life anyway.

“Once again, it would have been the working-class pupils, who flogged their guts out to do well, expected some good results, but were then dismayed to find that ,somehow, they hadn’t done well enough.

“And, in the way this system always works, the victims end up blaming themselves and wish they could have worked harder or were, “more intelligent” etc.”

Looking at this year’s GCSE results in comparison with last year’s, that comment seems very close to the mark – although This Writer doesn’t think it’s about denying college places to people from state schools.

It’s about lying that state school pupils don’t deserve college places and independent/grammar school pupils do.

Look at the way top grades – over all candidates – have shot up by almost half since teacher evaluation was used instead of examinations – from 22 per cent of the total in 2019 to 30 per cent in 2021.

To me, that doesn’t indicate a sudden improvement in pupil performance and it certainly doesn’t indicate that exam conditions have a bad effect on grades.

It tells me that pupils at examinations have been traditionally and habitually marked down, if they were from state schools.

Further evidence is in the way teachers at independent and grammar schools, seeing last year’s results, have marked their pupils up in order to maintain their lead.

What, you think the quality of their teaching or the abilities of their pupils have suddenly shot up by three percent since last year (for grammars) and 14 per cent since 2019 (for independents)?

That isn’t realistic.

And, coupled with the rise in A-level grades over the same period of time and for the same reason, it gives me reason to suggest that state school pupils who took exams in 2019 and at any year before need to get angry.

We should be demanding to know why our results were so low in comparison to the grammars and the independents.

What were the criteria used in marking our papers?

Was there inbuilt bias against state schools? If so, who demanded it?

Any such bias will certainly have -arbitrarily – blighted our careers ever since, and that is utterly unacceptable.

Realistically, we won’t get honest answers from a system that is biased against us. We’ll be fobbed off with lies.

So how about an experiment?

Let’s demand a new system in which exam papers are anonymised – pupils are given numbers to put on their papers, and then the papers are mixed up centrally before being sent to examiners who have not been told any details of their origin.

Then they would have to mark honestly, and then we might learn what has really been going on in the UK’s education system.

As one of millions who are likely to have been penalised on the basis of the school I attended, I’m up for it.

How about you?

Source: GCSE results: pupils achieve record numbers of top grades in England

Part-time prime minister Johnson is off on his holibobs again

On his bike: this is an old pic but you can bet Boris Johnson couldn’t wait to run away from all the chaos he has caused.

Do you find it as disturbing as I do that Boris Johnson disappears on holiday whenever the going gets tough for his government?

He ran away when the country faced a huge flooding crisis back in February – can you remember that far back?

He’s away again now, in the middle of the furore over school exam results.

And he even took paternity leave at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, when his ministers were running around like headless chickens, cutting a swathe of death through the UK’s elderly and disabled population – and National Health Service workers.

He said he would go to Scotland for his break, but it would be more appropriate for him to visit in his official capacity – to apologise for, and explain why, his Scottish Conservative leader’s absence from a VJ Day anniversary event to act as a linesman in a football match.

It seems Johnson is not the only part-timer on the Conservatives’ team!

And it might do him some good to have to explain absenteeism by another member of his team.

In fact, if you are a Scottish reader of This Site and you happen upon Johnson in your day-to-day business, why not challenge him over this – and take video of it if you can?

Meanwhile the Twittering classes have been having fun:

Oh… flooding back again, is it? No wonder Johnson has cleared off again, then.

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Victory for school pupils as Tories give up attempt to downgrade them for not being rich

Gavin Williamson: he had to find an excuse to backtrack.

Tory Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has given up his bid to use the Covid-19 lockdown as a weapon against school pupils.

After a wave of protest swept the UK over his use of an algorithm that automatically gave pupils at private schools higher grades than those at state schools – and in fact downgraded state school pupils’ grades based on the performance of previous exam candidates from their school who were nothing to do with them, it seems clear that Williamson has been looking for a way it.

He found it today (August 17). Consider this, from the BBC’s article: “He added the government decided to change policy – bringing England in line with the other UK nations – after it saw a number of outliers that did not ‘make sense’ when Ofqual released additional data about its algorithm at the weekend.”

It’s a rather obvious excuse.

In reality, I think we all know that the Tories – who currently rely heavily on public opinion to form their policies – had realised that they had gone too far with what seemed a clear example of class war.

The attack on ‘A’ level students’ grades would have affected their entire future lives and careers – and although the electorate is generally thought to have a short memory, nobody is likely to forget that kind of betrayal in a hurry.

Here’s the evidence:

The weekend saw a wave of protest:

… including ill-feeling towards the children of richer parents who benefited from the algorithm the Tories used to pretend they had fared better than their poorer counterparts:

But the last straw was probably the decision by the Labour-run Welsh government to follow its Scottish counterpart and ignore the prejudiced Tory algorithm in favour of teachers’ assessments.

It meant the general public would consider the devolved governments – run by political parties other than the Tories – to be on their side, while the Tories were trying to harm them.

So we get this decision to give up and let both ‘A’ level and GCSE pupils have the grades they deserve, and a claim that it is because the government found a fault in its algorithm – which is easy to make as we all know prejudice was written into it.

But I don’t think it will save them at election time, once these pupils are old enough to vote.

They know what the Tories were doing – what Gavin Williamson wanted to do.

He wanted to steal their futures and hand them to people who don’t deserve them.

And I think they’ll remember that.

Note: Say what he likes, Keir Starmer had nothing to do with the government’s u-turn.

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Gavin Williamson’s bigotry has endangered the futures of thousands of people – and the UK as a whole

Promoted beyond his abilities: Gavin Williamson was fired as Defence Secretary last year after… someone… leaked information about Chinese firm Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G system (and look how that story has developed). Now he has messed up the hopes of thousands of ‘A’ level students.

What a fiasco – and all to create an artificial impression that privately-educated school pupils are better than those in the state system.

We all knew that school pupils taken their GCSE and ‘A’ level exams have been seriously disrupted this year, with schools being closed from late March.

This meant it was impossible for their exams to go ahead in the normal way, with knock-on effects for the future of candidates as they apply to move into a career or further education.

There are ways to make fairly accurate predictions of each pupils’ likely achievements, based on their mock examination results and their term work.

But Education Secretary Gavin Williamson couldn’t be bothered with all of that, so this year’s results are estimates – figures plucked from some apparatchik’s rear end.

The results he has produced show a clear bias in favour of privately-educated pupils that is unlikely to stand up to scrutiny; it seems Williamson has simply promoted the children of rich Tory voters above everybody else.

Picture the scene if you can: Williamson in his office, looking at students’ details.

WILLIAMSON: “Julian Huntley Farquar – studying at Harrowton*. Predicted grades are C, C and… C. We’ll give you an A, A* and, oh, I think another A. Well done, Julian for going to the right school!

“Now, who’s this? Billy Tozer. Factorytown Comprehensive. Predicted A, A and A*! That’ll never do. You can have a D, U and D, Billy – and that’ll teach you not to be born to poor, working-class parents next time!”

(Who’s the real DUD in this vignette, by the way?)

Result: Bedlam.

People are right to be outraged. These seems to be another clear example of the Tories using the Covid-19 crisis to hammer anybody who doesn’t have a million quid in the bank.

Look at these examples of deliberate downgrading:

And how has the Education Secretary responded?

Not only has he said (through Ofqual) that appealing against these false, imposed grades would harm other pupils in the appellant’s school…

But changing the grades would promote pupils “beyond their abilities”:

https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1293870590642851841

I think I speak for the entire United Kingdom when I say that this fiasco has certainly shown how one person has been promoted beyond his abilities – that person being Gavin Williamson.

Williamson should resign – or be sacked again. By downgrading pupils who didn’t go to posh, expensive schools he is harming the future of the whole of the United Kingdom.

Given the right opportunities, those students could go on to become captains of business, industry, science and the arts, leading the nation forward into a brighter future.

But now those opportunities will go to dim Julian who hasn’t got a clue – just because he went to the right school.

It is a crime against the nation.

Oh… the official leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, has said something about this, but it isn’t even worth repeating.

I will repeat some of the responses to him, though:

From Rachael Swindon: “Why aren’t you calling for Gavin Williamson to go immediately? STOP HELPING THE TORIES FFS.”

And from Raphael Dogg: “Criticise. The. Fucking. Government.”

If either of those tweeters is a Labour Party member, I have no doubt that Mr Starmer will be having them expelled as soon as possible.

*Feeble attempt to concoct a fictional public school name.

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The government is weak and Labour should take the advantage

Don't dribble, David! The spittle on his chin shows us exactly how much calm leadership we can expect from this over-promoted, spoilt, overgrown child.

Don’t dribble, David! The spittle on his chin shows us exactly how much calm leadership we can expect from this over-promoted, spoilt, overgrown child.

As the Commons went into recess, both David Cameron and Nick Clegg were desperately trying to reassert their authority – not just over the government but their political parties as a whole.

For Cameron, the last couple of weeks must be like falling into an ever-deepening pit, lined with members of his own party who are criticising him and calling him ugly names.

UKIP – or, as I think I’ll call them from now on, BLIP – humiliated him at the local elections; the EU issue stayed with him when his own Parliamentary party tried to amend the Queen’s speech; Tory grandees including Tebbit, Howe and Lawson spoke against him; he alienated his grassroots party members, who now firmly believe that the Tories in government think they are “swivel-eyed loons”; and this week he alienated them again by pushing through the same-sex marriage bill via a deal with Labour, even though Conservative association members have been saying that his government is now acting against the wishes of modern Conservatives.

(Traditionally, if an amendment to the so-called ‘Gracious speech’ had succeeded, Cameron would have been forced to resign and a new government would have had to be formed. An alternative amendment, put forward by Labour’s John Mann, regretted that there was no plan for a referendum on the Coalitions shameful and abhorrent treatment of the National Health Service. Had Speaker John Bercow chosen this for discussion, matters might have been very different indeed.)

Apparently there has been some kind of campaign to oust Nick Clegg as Liberal Democrat leader, but he is now such an irrelevance to politics that I couldn’t be bothered to look up the details.

It is in this atmosphere that both men (we can hardly call them leaders any more) took to speechifying, as if talking themselves up would make any difference.

It didn’t help that Cameron included one statement that we can all see is blatantly untrue: He said the Conservative Party was a “broad church” and would continue to be, under his leadership. In fact it has become – more than ever before – a minority-interest group, aiming to suck all the money in the country into the hands of the wealthiest party members and their friends in big business, impoverishing the rest. This blog has made that clear from the start.

Cameron said the government was focused on issues that were “squarely in the national interest”. Let’s have a look at some of those issues.

The Huffington Post tells us that it may be possible to use the forthcoming Anti-Social Behaviour Bill to make homelessness a crime – and this has given rise to fears that, in conjunction with the Conservatives’ implementation of laws that make it extremely hard for poorer people to keep up rent payments on their homes, and their support of privately-owned prisons, they are planning to bring back the 19th-century idea of the workhouse, with poor people worked mercilessly to make money for the idle rich. It may seem like fantasy, but there’s something in it!

What about the failure of the Work Programme? Does anyone remember Iain Duncan Smith (Vox‘s Monster of the Year, 2012) wagging his finger and screaming at Owen Jones on Question Time last year – “I didn’t hear you screaming about two and a half million people who were parked, nobody saw them, for over 10 years, not working, no hope, no aspiration. We are changing their lives”. In fact, the government is not changing their lives, unless Mr… Smith admits he meant changing them for the worse.

Parliament’s Work and Pensions Committee has discovered “growing evidence” that organisations involved in the Work Programme are the ones that are “parking” the most disadvantaged people, who had spent the longest period of time out of work.

They’re not interested in helping people; they don’t want to boost the economy by increasing employment. All these firms want is their pay packet from the Department of Work and Pensions. That is what we see.

And we have Michael Gove, failing the youth of this nation with his ridiculous ideas about education. These can be summed up by saying, “State education must never be as good as private education and state pupils must never be allowed to achieve high results”. This is why he interfered with the marking of GCSE exam papers last year (did he do it to A-levels as well?), prompting the Welsh and Northern Irish education ministers to intervene.

Mr Gove’s reaction to that, revealed this week, has been to write to the ministers concerned, suggesting that they should set up their own examination system. A Whitehall source, quoted in The Guardian, said: “The Welsh are determined to keep dumbing down their exams. Leighton Andrews interfered with exam boards last year. He opposes our attempts to toughen things up and made clear he will continue to interfere to make things easier. It’s better that we all go our own way and defend our positions to our electorates.”

For a Conservative Party that is supposedly trying not to be divisive, those words are a shot in the foot.

The Welsh Government, seeing this for what it is, responded tersely: “Wales is keeping GCSEs and A-levels, as is Northern Ireland. We wish Mr Gove well with his plans to rename these qualifications in England.” In other words, it is the English system under Gove that will let pupils down.

This is the landscape we currently inhabit. The government has treated the people abominably and seems determined to continue in the same manner. Sympathy for it is draining away and the people are looking for an alternative.

It’s time for Her Majesty’s Opposition – the Labour Party – to step up and offer that alternative. Not ‘Tory Lite’ or another shade of neoliberalism but a genuine plan to improve this once-great nation’s fortunes.

Over to you, Mr Miliband. No pressure.