If you write for a big blog and you also run a small specialist blog like this one, here's one of the things you do. You put a story up on your small blog. You get a comment on it. You then rehash that comment into a posting on the big blog. And then you recycle any comments you get there back to the small blog. And you keep on doing that until you are the Ruler of the Universe.
So, this time around, the starting point was this posting here about the collapsing British exam system, which Emma commented upon, which I then put up at Samizdata, and which Guy Herbert then commented upon there, thus:
I'm surprised you don't recall that once upon a time – as little as 20 years ago – we did have a market-like system for qualifications for GCEs O-levels, and A-levels (and the forgotton "S-levels" for those for whom A-levels were not demanding enough). The various exam boards were independent, and schools would choose between them, depending on the sort of syllabus they wanted to pursue. The government didn't set the syllabus. The exams were kept honest by competition, because the universities and other consumers of the qualified could discount a board's qualifications if it got too lax.My reading of the QCA's railway-style approach is that it's a Parkinsonian scheme to increase its own size and influence, which will be supported and encouraged by the government as a means to tighter central control. Compare the invention of the Strategic Rail Authority. While there are still lots of exam boards--even as currently constituted--it wouldn't be a vast adminstrative task just to abolish the QCA and the national currriculum and let nature set the course.
All of which is far too well informed and intelligent not to pass on to you lot, just in case you don't bother with Samizdata. (I certainly hope that this is true of some of you. I try to put at least some stuff here that is of interest to people with very different political prejudices to mine.)
I did sort of know what Guy says about how exams used to be, but there's sort of knowing and really knowing. I mean, did the Ministry of Education in those days have no influence on the exam choices made by State Schools? I don't know. But Guy seems fairly sure that they didn't.
That's a problem I've always had with learning things. I've never been happy about just taking one person's word for it. I need to get the story from several different and preferably unrelated directions. Which I think is an attitude that has educational implications.
One thing I think it means is that with teaching, as with the political persuading which is what I have spent a lot of my life doing, you have to be content to say your piece to your "pupils", and then let them make of it what they want to. Which might very well include nothing.
And exams, of course, don't fit very well with that attitude.
Yes, the exam boards were independent, and fiercely competitive. And the different syllabi had very different leanings and emphases. Does anyone else remember Salter's Chemistry GCSE?
The introduction of GCSE was putatively about avoiding having people come out of school with no qualifications at all (ALL shall have prizes) and the planning was centralised, leaning heavily on subject specialists who were already examiners. The people administering the exams are no longer subject specialists, for the most part.
Central control of school exams is arguably linked to increasing demands for accountability and quantifiability across society. Is it because people are no longer content that their tax money simply disappear without trace into the yawning maw of public services? Or does it connect with the success of companies who display their internal workings to customers?
UPDATE: I said previously that an anonymous friend of mine was asked to do double the usual stint of exam script marking. A couple of days ago, they were asked by their exam board to do yet another full stint's worth.
The system is imploding RIGHT NOW!!!
ps the friend said No thanks and went off on holiday.
Thank-you, kind sir. I'm often in doubt how well founded my own opinions are.
Yes; the DES had a bit of influence on what schools did, but not a lot, and certainly no direct control. LEA's had the nominal and practical power to determine a whole lot more--and some, notably ILEA, did so disastrously--but most schools still decided for themselves what exams would be taken and by whom. Typically the head of department would decide what exams and what board.
However, it was the Thatcher government that first introduced a national curriculum, DES supervision of teachers (as opposed to school inspection), and state control of syllabuses. My assumption is it was suckered by the department into fixing the wrong problem with the LEAs.
And thanks again Guy, for that.
For the benefit of Malaysians, Southern Californians, etc., I will guess what the various acronyms Guy uses in his quoted bit, and comment above, stand for:
GCE: General Certificate of Education (but not sure)
QCA: Qualification something something (i.e. don't know)
DES: Department of Education and Science (precursor of the Department for Education and Training i.e. the Ministry of Education)
LEA: Local Education Authority
ILEA: Inner London Education Authority
All these are guesses and the chances of all of them being right are very small.
Correction comments welcome.
All correct. Sorry folks, I'll adopt the Economist style guide in future postings here and elswhere and expand/explain abbreviations when I use them.
QCA stands for Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The horrifying scope and nature of its current activities is set out at http://www.qca.org.uk/
GCE was originally a matriculation qualification, and until the 80s ran in parallel to an inferior examination, the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education), the top grade of which was nominally equivalent to a pass at GCE in the same subject. The failure of anybody to believe the equivalence led to the DES forcing the elision of the two systems into the current GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education).
