When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you.
Easy though GCSEs have become, it transpires that for government propaganda purposes they are still not easy enough. The government’s much-trumpeted claims about turning around low-performing schools are based not so much upon improved GCSE results as on a switch to a much lesser-known qualification called General National Vocational Qualification, or GNVQ.
In September, David Miliband, the schools minister, caught a train to Birmingham for what has become for him a typical engagement: a visit to a sometime bog standard inner-city comprehensive school which has been turned into a shining example of what can be achieved thanks to the government’s enlightened education policy. In fact, on this occasion there were three schools for Mr Miliband to visit: the Ninestiles School, the International School and the Waverley School, which together have been formed into the ‘Ninestiles Federation’ run by a single ‘executive head’. Until recently, these schools were run separately and considered by some to be beyond hope. Judged by what has become the standard measure of assessment for state schools — the percentage of GCSE candidates achieving five or more exam passes at grades A* to C — the International School was graded in 2003 as the ninth worst in the country, with just 9 per cent of pupils achieving five or more GCSEs at A* to C.
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