Education, Edukashun, Ed Balls…

Once again, New Labour has been caught cheating at exams….and employers are being duped by the scam.

I wonder if, like me, you thought that a GCSE was a GCSE? Pretty meaningless as a qualification, but unequivocal for all that: the kids might get a pass based on 35% of their answers being right, but an A* is exactly that…and a C is a C.

Prepare yourselves for a shock: a C is not necessarily what you might expect it to be. Senior teaching sources tell me that for some years now, a Department of Education scam to kid employers into thinking they have a C-grade genius has been operating.

It seems there are two ‘forms’ of GCSE: ‘higher’ (for the 100% of children who will go to University by 2020) and ‘foundation’ (for those unable to build a Hadron Collider, and thus doomed to become the 0% training to be plumbers, brickies and sparks).

The ‘real’ GCSE scores from A-D. You can get an E, but as one source told The Slog, “the mind boggles at how thick you’d have to be”. On the whole, employers won’t look at anything below C. Hence the scam.

The ‘fake’ GCSE has a maximum grade of C…and is a whole lot easier than the real thing. Here is a genuine question from the 2008 foundation science paper:

For hundreds of years scientists have found information about the stars and planets using:

A–telescopes, B–microscopes, C–space probes, D–seismometers

Shades of the £100 Millionaire question there. It gets worse: the biology ‘foundation’ exam shows a human head, with four arrows pointing to eyes, ears, mouth and nose. The student has to match these correctly to:

– Light receptors – Sound receptors – Liquid Chemical Receptors – Gaseous chemical receptors

Kids getting this one wrong are going to struggle forming lasting relationships.If you doubt this one by the way, the link to the full paper is here.

But here’s the clincher: employers are not given any means of distinguishing between a genuine ‘knows what a bunsen burner is’ C and the ‘can’t tell mouth from ears and thus nearly starving’ C.

It takes a lot to shake teachers these days, but my sources were gobsmacked by all this. One writes to me thus:

‘…grade degradation has been taking place, as we all know. The main change being that in my day to obtain an A grade you had to be in the top 5% of all the marks, whereas now a percentage is set for each grade before the exam even takes place, so it is possible, no likely, that many more than 5% of kids will obtain an A – hence the hoo-ha from the universities which resulted in the addition of the A* grade…(but)….I am for once genuinely shocked…when told that this was a genuine GCSE Biology question, and I didn’t believe it.’

I wonder if Ed Balls has got a GCSE C-Grade in Tweeting?