Tories rig GCSE results for headlines and profit!

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Fuck the students, we've got a Daily Mail headline to get!

GCSE results: headteacher attacks Michael Gove over marking 'butchery'
One of education secretary's favourite headteachers says schools are united in condemnation of marking down GCSEs
Share 147

Email
Robert Booth
guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 August 2012 17.48 BST
Jump to comments (285)

Michael Gove fails to fully understand the 'butchery' of the marking down of GCSE English students, according to headteacher John Townsley. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
One of Michael Gove's favourite headteachers has rounded on the education secretary, claiming he has failed to understand the "butchery" of marking down GCSE English students in an attempt to counter grade inflation.

John Townsley, the head of two academy schools in Leeds, who has been singled out for praise by Gove for turning round failing schools, said that academies and other schools involved are now united around the issue and considering supporting plans for legal action against the exam regulator, Ofqual, that is being drawn up by local authorities.

His comments come after a backlash against Thursday's GCSE results, which saw students who would have received a C grade for English if they had submitted their papers in January awarded a D grade for the same marks gained this summer. Townsley said he and other heads were "incredibly angry on behalf of the children" who unexpectedly dropped a grade, in some cases putting their places at college in jeopardy.

Local authorities are indicating that a case could be brought on the allegation that the mark-down breached laws on equal opportunities. Headteachers said evidence suggested the downgrades had hit pupils from poor backgrounds and ethnic minorities hardest.

The intervention from Townley, who until March was also a board member of Ofqual and chairs the Specialist School and Academy Trust – which has a membership of more than 5,000 schools – will be an embarrassment for Gove, who has spoken out against grade inflation but this week denied placing any political pressure on exam boards such as AQA, or Ofqual, to raise the bar on this summer's exams.

"Headteachers are totally supportive of the idea that there shouldn't be guaranteed year-on-year rises in results and we accepted the need for sophisticated change," Townsley said. "But what has taken place in the AQA has been butchery. I do not believe the secretary of state or the Department for Education fully understands the extent to which AQA's performance has been totally unreliable."

Brian Lightman, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said his organisation was gathering more evidence on who had been marked down. "If we are advised that legal action is the right way to challenge this, then that is what we will do," he said.

Judith Blake, the deputy leader of Leeds city council, said: "We are working with all of the other local authorities which are similarly affected to see what the best way of mounting a challenge is. If it takes a legal challenge, we will look at what grounds we have. In the first place we will be looking at how AQA has responded to any directives from the Department for Education about the grade level. The way the AQA has dealt with this has seriously disadvantaged the life chances in Leeds of a minimum of 600 people [who were predicted at least a C in English and received a D]."

Townsley said: "There would be a united front across academies and schools with regards to that action. It would be against the awarding bodies and Ofqual because it is a question of equal opportunity for all young people."

Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, wrote to the chairman of the Commons education select committee, Graham Stuart, the Conservative MP for Beverley and Holderness, on Friday, to demand a parliamentary inquiry to restore confidence in the exam system. He wrote: "Parents, pupils and teachers have a right to understand what has happened. However, ministers cannot hide behind exam boards or Ofqual. Michael Gove has said this is nothing to do with him and that 'inevitably there will be changes'. That is not good enough."

Gove also faced pressure from the right. John Redwood, the Conservative MP for Wokingham, wrote on his blog: "It is unfair on those taking the exams if they do not know what is expected, or if the standards change between the time they start and the time they finish without them knowing it.""It is particularly unfair if someone needs a C or higher in a GCSE to go on to further study, and has just failed to get this through some unannounced change in the standard required."

The Association of School and College Leaders called for an investigation into the changes to grade boundaries and several schools said they would challenge the English results.

Stephanie Framcom, the assistant principal of St Aidan's Church of England Academy in Darlington, said: "Last year, 44% of our students achieved five A to C GCSE passes, including English and maths, but this year we are looking at a pass rate of 34%, which is not acceptable and is being strongly contested."

Steve Allen, the principal of De Ferrers Academy in Horninglow, Staffordshire, said: "Our students and teachers work incredibly hard and take pride in their GCSE results ... We will be appealing against the GCSE English results and asking for a full re-mark and justification."

In a statement Ofqual said: "Grade boundaries can change from exam series to exam series. Decisions on grade boundaries are made after the assessments have been taken, based on all the available evidence. In the summer, more information was available about performance across the qualification than in January. Exam boards considered this and made decisions accordingly, to make sure that the final qualification grades were comparable with last year's."

Another London local authority said 150 students were directly involved. The Association of Directors of Children's Services said its members were planning to negotiate with colleges on behalf of students who received D in English and so missed out on further education places.

A spokeswoman for AQA confirmed it has been contacted by schools complaining about the results but repeated denials that it had been under political pressure to alter the grading system.

Case study

Gary Jackson, 16, a student at Archbishop Ilsley Catholic high school in Birmingham, was confidently expecting to get a C in English language when he picked up his GCSE results on Thursday. Instead he got a D.

The AQA exam board had lifted the boundary for a C by 10 points, and Jackson had missed out by one mark – unfairly, he and the school believe. The school is appealing against the results of 34 other students. All Jackson's other GCSEs, including English literature, were grades A to C.

He said: "My mum has been told by the school that the grade boundary for a C used to be 180 and I've got 188 points, which should be well within a C and almost a B, but they've moved the boundary. If they'd not moved it, I would have got a strong C. I feel gutted.

"The school is going to appeal because I feel as if I have been misled by the exam board. I left the school feeling confident about my English language and now I've got a D. When I picked up my results, I looked at my grades, saw the D and thought: 'what on earth is that about?' I was worried about being able to take my A levels and how it is going to affect me in the long- term when I go to university. Because universities look at the GCSE results you get first time round, it has really knocked my confidence.

"If the exam board don't change the grade back to a C, then I'm going to have to resit it while doing my A levels, which is an added and unnecessary stress.

"It's always going to be the average student, like me, that's affected by this. The people who get the top grades haven't been affected. It's the average student, who should have got a C, but who is now looking at a D, and it is so unfair." Helen Carter

Long story short. The current Tory government have been bitching since day one that the current high school exams are too easy and they want to reform them. Before anybody jumps in, I agree that there's probably some merit to that argument. However, instead of reforming the exams the right way, which is to rewrite the entire syllabus/exam papers for the new cycle of students and accept that the results won't come in until 2014 they decided to instead put pressure on the exam boards to arbitrarily revise all the grade boundaries upwards at the last minute, concentrating particularly on the C/D boundary (which went up by about 10 points). What this means is that if one student sat the exam in January, and one sat the exact same exam in June and both wrote down exactly the same content the January student would get a C and the June student would get a D.

It gets better when you realise that under the new target rules for GCSEs, any school that gets below a certain percentage of A*-C passes for its students (I think it's 40%) is automatically taken under new management and turned into "academies" (read as: privatising education). So the Tories have probably fucked over a substantial amount of young people so they can get a few good headlines about falling exam results and a chance to push their pet education program.

Lower than vermin indeed...

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Fuck. Somehow this got posted twice. Could a mod possibly delete the duplicate? Terribly sorry.

[Edi]

Fuck. Somehow this got posted twice. Could a mod possibly delete the duplicate? Terribly sorry.

No worries, happens from time to time. It's gone.

[Zaune]

You know, I am a pretty reasonable and fair-minded guy, almost to a fault in fact. I pride myself on always, always giving the people the benefit of the doubt and crediting them with not deliberately setting out to cause harm.

I'm at the limits of my ability to do that with the Tories now. This is just flat-out deliberate cruelty.

[Simon_Jester]

There's a certain pathological arrogance that kicks in with neoliberal politicians (look that word up if you don't remember it) and education.

Start with the assumption of radical meritocracy, as mediated through the free market: anyone who deserves to get rich will, anyone who doesn't get rich, didn't deserve it. Repeat that sentence for "enter middle class" and "have enough to buy food and shelter."

Now, add the premise that what matters about the individual is their ability to "create value" in an economic setting. Your relevance to society depends on your contribution to someone's balance sheet, in other words.

The educational model that 'makes sense' in that mindset doesn't look like the ideal of 20th-century democracy. There doesn't need to be any real mechanism by which normal people can advance in society. You only need a minority of the population to be well educated, and it really doesn't matter if the rest are because they're low-value people, and their children are low-value people by default.

Privatized schools are pretty good at taking unusually high-performing kids (a few low-income geniuses and a lot of high-income people who had good tutors) and turning them into excellent students. It's actually not that hard to do this, if you get to pick and choose your starting material, and don't have to worry about someone deciding to screw over your building to pander to voters.

So privatized schools work very well with the neoliberal model of education, while public schools that teach everyone are (in that model) more suited to housing the teenage proles until they're old enough to be easier to control.

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Looks like the schools association aren't taking it lying down.

GCSE results: angry headteachers demand total re-mark of English papers
Schools association to take legal action over boundaries change, while exams regulator says it will look again at gradings
Share 54

Email
Toby Helm, political editor
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 25 August 2012 20.06 BST
Jump to comments (305)

Students sitting their GCSE exams: it has emerged that more than 4,000 students expecting a grade C in English were downgraded to a D. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
The GCSE exams controversy has reached new heights as headteachers across the country demanded a "total re-mark" of all English papers taken by their students this year.

The move to deluge the exam authorities with demands for mass re-marks comes amid growing optimism within the teaching profession that thousands of pupils will, in the end, be awarded higher grades in English than those they were awarded on Thursday.

One of Michael Gove's favourite headteachers, Joan McVittie, who is the outgoing president of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said she had been contacted by more than 100 secondary heads in recent days who were so furious that they were now demanding re-marks of all English papers. "The authorities will not be able to handle that," she said. "There is huge anger out there. The whole thing is so unfair on pupils whose lives will be affected by these results. I am confident we can get things changed for the better."

Previously it had been thought schools would appeal only in respect of individual pupils who they felt had been particularly harshly treated.

The ASCL, which represents over 17,000 heads, deputy heads and other school leaders, is also intending to take legal action against the exam authorities for imposing the higher grade boundaries on pupils who took English exams in June than those who did so in January.

Anger among pupils, parents and teachers has risen after it emerged that more than 4,000 GCSE students expecting a grade C in English were downgraded to a D – meaning many will struggle to get on to college courses or into apprenticeships next month.

Many thousands more failed to reach their predicted grades, entirely because the grade boundaries had been raised before the June marking took place.

On Saturday night, as threats of legal action mounted, the exams regulator, Ofqual, said it would look again at GCSE gradings. In a letter to the National Association of Head Teachers, Ofqual's chief regulator, Glenys Stacey, wrote: "We recognise the continuing concerns among students, parents and teachers about this year's GCSE English results.

"We will look closely at how the results were arrived at. We will do this quickly, but thoroughly, so that we ensure confidence is maintained in our exam system."

Mike Griffiths, headteacher at Northampton School for Boys, the first high-performing school to become an academy after Gove became secretary of state for education in May 2010, said the issue would not only have a potentially disastrous effect on pupils who failed to get a necessary C grade in English, but also on those hoping to study at elite institutions who fell short of getting As or A*s.

"If you are applying to a Russell Group university, for instance, to study medicine or law, and all the applicants have a string of A*s, they will look back to the GCSEs and see a B in English – and that could decide your fate," he said. "It is the only way to differentiate. It could well be the reason they don't get into the university they have set their hearts on."

Griffiths said headteachers were determined to rectify the situation "because we have a duty of care to our students." He added: "It was clear as soon as we opened the results that something was wrong."

McVittie, who is head of Woodside High School, an academy in Haringey, north London where 80% of pupils do not speak English as their first language, said her school had been praised by David Cameron last year as a model institution only to be dealt a huge blow by this year's marking decision.

Writing in the Observer, she says that after years of efforts to raise standards and morale, her pupils were shattered when they failed to achieve crucial C grades, which is essential for many courses.

"For the first time in six years, we had students crying on results day as they had failed to be awarded the grades my staff had advised them they were on target to achieve," she says.

She predicts that more than 1,000 schools will demand that all English papers be re-marked, in the hope that those judged on the June boundaries are given the same grade as those marked in January. The legal challenges against exam boards and Ofqual are being mounted on the grounds that one group of students has been treated more generously than others, breaching the obligation to treat all pupils the same.

The row is a major headache for Gove, who is keen to see an end to so-called grade inflation. Gove has denied any political interference to lower grades. But with MPs on the education selection committee set to consider launching an inquiry, he could face detailed questioning on the issue in coming weeks.

The decision by schools to demand mass re-marking of papers takes the dispute to new levels, as it would involve a huge, costly and time-consuming exercise at the start of the new school term.

Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg welcomed Ofqual's announcement but said it had to address "the unfairness of similar work getting a C in January and a D in May." An independent cross-parliamentary inquiry was still necessary, in addition, he said.

This is good news, and it's nice to see that the schools association (including some figures who up until this point have been full-blown supporters of the Conservative's education policy) seem to be completely united in their condemnation. Also there should definitely be a Parliamentary inquiry on this. If evidence comes out that Gove did put pressure on the exam boards to revise the grade boundaries upwards (and remember that the guy has already gotten into trouble for using private e-mail to discuss Departmental business as opposed to the recordable official e-mail) then his career as a minister at any level should be finished. Good riddance to the little shit, quite frankly. One of the most odious, unqualified members of an odious, unqualified government.