Stories + Views
It’s true I feel passionate about the education of our children; that’s why I get angry when Toby Young spouts his ignorant nonsense…
So it’s late at night, I’m not feeling that well, and I’m asked by the BBC to comment on Michael Gove’s proposals to return to O Levels with Toby Young. He and I do have ‘history’; whenever he takes a chance, he has a pop at me. Furthermore, Gove’s proposals about returning to O Levels do really worry me.
I felt drowned out by Toby’s irrelevant drivel about England slipping down the world league tables; this — this simply wasn’t the topic for discussion and yet it was the only thing he was able to talk about — and wanted to stress the point that returning to O Levels will be a disaster if it happens. I am particularly concerned about right-wingers like Michael Gove and Toby holding up Singapore as a shining example of good practice when we all now that it is what one might politely call an “autocratic” state but, as I say on air, it could be more accurately described as a fascist one; dissenting voices are regularly silenced, and you can get jailed for very minor infringements of the law. The education system there clearly is there to prop up what is a corrupt regime; it may be very nice to visit as a tourist, but living there is clearly another matter entirely. Of course, if we had a fascist state here, we almost certainly would get better exam results than we currently do, but fortunately, we live in a democracy where you’re allowed to air your views and express your emotions without the fear of being carted off by the secret police. Children here have to learn to negotiate and deal with the freedoms they have partly in school; we no longer can beat children or imprison them for minor misdemeanours. This is as it should be.
I still stand by the points I was making on the BBC news channel about O Levels being a totally inadequate exam and don’t, at this point, feel that bad about my “robust” delivery. Some people liked it, others hated it; whatever you think, it makes for quite lively TV. But I notice that the right-wing are after me on this one; I’ve even got Guido Fawkes and the Toadmeister himself blogging about me! I made no personal remarks, I was just trying to stick to the argument; my tone, yes, was an angry one, but I feel passionate about this issue and feel that dissenting voices are being drowned out in the media. Especially, the voices of teachers. The relentless attack on our profession is utterly depressing and I feel totally demoralised by them; yes, I do feel angry, very angry at this miserable government’s policies and all of its cheerleaders for relentlessly saying that we’re rubbish. Can you give us a break?
I represent no organisation, I’m certainly no hired ‘union’ hand and certainly wouldn’t describe myself as left wing; as Guido Fawkes says I once sent my child to a private school and I supported my local school becoming an academy. What worries me the most at the moment is the way we assess our children; GCSEs could be so much better and do need to be stripped down. Personally, I think teacher-assessment would be much better at 16; teachers are best placed to assess the whole child, not just the very narrow range of skills that GCSEs assess; O Levels, without the coursework element or the assessment of things like speaking and listening skills, are far, far narrower than our existing GCSEs. We need give the power to teachers to assess how our children are doing in all spheres: their problem-solving skills, their initiative, their ability to come up with new ideas, their creativity. This is best done within the context of the classroom and in a “non-threatening” atmosphere so that these assessments can be used to improve a child’s skills. This is what the Finnish do, and have the top performing education system in the world as a consequence.
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Comments, replies and queries
Reply
The problem for Tory sympathisers is that people feel very angry about many aspects of this government’s behaviour and policies and the cronies clearly find that hard to take. THe easiest way for them to deflect it is by personal attacks, which should be ignored while the anger is harnessed to campaign vigorously against these bad ideas which now emerge from Whitehall on a daily basis.
Keep going Wonderfrancis!!
I have never looked at Guido Fawkes before….and Gove worries about dumbing down in schools!! He should look in his own backyard more.
Francis,
Your passion and frustration came across in the video – good on you!
And, and as you say, it is hard for others to realise how much unpleasant and highly personal goading there is of those of us who put a different view to the official one goes on – including on this website.
I’ve been receiving really disturbing personal messages from people who’ve been explaining that since this government came into power there has been an extreme culture whereby anyone who has even mildly criticised Michael Gove in a joking way has found that they have suddenly become unemployable and that their invoices for work already done have not been paid.
I was fired from my main source of income after I started to write in forums ways which were critical of this government without any explanation or appeal being allowed and I have been subject to campaigns of abuse with systematic lies about me being sent to organisations I am associated with. This is reality. It’s what’s going on. Anyone who stands up to talk about the reality of education is going to find it really hard. This is why so few people are doing it. Most teachers have bills to pay and relationships with students and school communities they don’t want threatened.
Melissa the level of goading on this website is tiny as there are plenty of independent minded people here who post in ways which balance views. Nobody who feels that much unpleasant and highly personal goading goes on in this forum should be attempting to take on Toby Young in a TV interview as they are clearly not ready for it. If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen. My personal hope is that Francis will learn from this experience and ensure that he is better prepared with his facts about education for future interviews and sticks to them rather than veering off in totally inappropriate political directions. This forum is an excellent place for him and others to gather facts and become better informed rapidly before interviews to supplement their wider research and preparation for television interviews.
Your tolerance does you credit. If this petulant child was on my team I’d lock him in the staffroom cupboard and throw away the key. What an embarrassment!
Toby Young is a disgrace to his good father’s memory.
I lived in Singapore. Put it this way. Given Toby Young’s self confessed history with drink and drug abuse Singapore would consider him an undesirable and wouldn’t want him entering the country. They would certainly not let this degenerate lead a school. He is a laughing stock and a shameful symbol of what the party he supports has done to your fine country. In Singapore he might even be shot!
Hugely depressing that 6 people “like” such a pathetic irrelevant comment.
Well done Francis. You have passion and concern for generations of young children whose lives are being ruined by a government which Toby Young supports and from which he has personally benefited. I think the anger you demonstrated in front of a court jester is one that many more people will share. Supporters of the Tories’ increasingly unsupportable policies – education, health, financial, social – have no depth to their arguments so roll up with the single arsenal of bear baiting. Toby Young is the embodiment of the moral and spiritual void of the present Tory party.
Keep up the good work Francis.
Real people?! You are about as real or the same as Pascal Sanbouclier or Tim Bidie. And I don’t think a selectively quoted cut and paste from the Economist represents “real people”.
Francis Finland outstrips Singapore in PISA results:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
Here’s one of the word democracy ranking systems:
http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm
Some other key insights,
Singapore does achieve excellent results in maths, because students are taught to base their maths on fundamental structures and axioms rather than being taught to memorise disconnected methods and facts. More info here: http://mathseducationandallthat.blogspot.co.uk/2011_05_01_archive.html
Finland tops the PISA tables across everything because it focuses on developing children as learners rather than on teaching them disconnected facts.
This government published a draft primary curriculum last week which demands precisely the opposite of what is done in both Singapore and Finland and insists on children learning facts rather than connected structures despite all advice to the contrary both from UK and international experts and all the research.
The main argument against Gove’s return to O-levels proposal is that there is no desire for it from anyone associated with education. It’s just more massive and expensive change for no coherent reason. The problem is not so much the proposal as the ongoing way in which Michael Gove is failing to create any link between education policy and reality.
If you’re going to take the topic on again Francis please make sure you’re fluent in these facts. Don’t go off into attacking another state, it doesn’t help.
Francis
I must say I was utterly shocked by that video. You argued that teachers should perform assessments at 16. But having seen that performance, in which you exhibit a total lack of self-control, how could I as a parent possibly trust you to conduct a fair assessment of my child?
Ricky if you want to criticise him engage with the issue. It’s not hard. Look for example at my comments above.
Don’t use his lack of experience in handing the pressure of this kind of TV interview to attack his skills in unrelated areas. When you use ad hominem abuse you let yourself down.
Hello Pot , meet Mr Kettle.
Paul – just ’cause Ricky’s at it is not an invitation for you to join in.
I don’t agree with Rick
Francis Gilbert is usually measured and intelligent – and passionate. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I respect him.
However, some people are deluded and idiotic, and I neither agree with them nor respect them.
Rebecca
I think the video is sufficient proof that there’s no point debating the issues with Francis. Besides, I’m not yet certain what I think about this issue or quite where I’d come down on some aspects.
However, I’m sure that I find it appalling to see a teacher behave like that and I would worry if my child might have to be alone with a person who behaved like that at school.
If any other public employee in a position of trust – a civil servant, a judge, a member of the armed forces etc were to behave like that on national TV, they’d probably be disciplined for bringing their organization or profession into disrepute.
But you are happy, are you, to let your children be led by a chair of governors of WLFS who referred to the Milly Dowler case as “that murdered schoolgirl thing”? Toby Young keeps his status as a D List celebrity and Z list political pundit by scribbling ignorant nonsense for The Sun on Sunday. Whilst anyone with a choice or principles is giving Murdoch a wide berth, here is Toby Young profiting from years having had his tongue firmly up Murdoch’s arse.
Personally, I think Francis has articulated the anger a lot of people feel about Gove and how his dangerous policies allow a selfish and divisive oaf like Young to run a school. He is unfit to do so.
If The Sun and the Daily Mail were not as complicit as Young, they would have urged their readers not to let their children near a man who mocks Milly Dowler’s murder and spent years stuffing cocaine up his nose then bragging about it. I’d trust any child with Gilbert before Young.
“having had his tongue firmly up Murdoch’s arse.”
My God, I hope you’re not a teacher!
Rick – I would worry if my child were in a school where a high-profile governor repeats statistics known to be faulty or incorrect. It shows a cavalier attitude towards truth. How would this person advise children who were to enter a debate – would he tell them to be scrupulously honest or would he suggest they misrepresent and, if that fails, make personal attacks on their opponent?
No doubt the children look up to their governor as a role model. This carries a heavy responsibility. So I would worry that my child would start emulating this behaviour.
Would I want my child to behave like that? The answer is, no.
I’m a teacher Ricky – so when I see people failing to achieve the standards they would like to achieve with a new task I look to see how they will go on to do themselves and the task they have chosen justice soon.
I understand you are not a teacher and that you prefer to denigrate people, but this does you no credit on an education forum.
I lecture in education and I tutor children at the minute.
So, like Ricky, of whom you say “I understand you are not a teacher” you actually aren’t one either then ?
I’m very disappointed in Toby Young. He keeps repeating the same argument about UK “plummeting down league tables” since 2000 when he knows that OECD found that the PISA 2000 figures used to underpin this argument are faulty and has warned that they should not be used for comparison.
How do we know Toby knows the figures are false? Because he reads this website and once commented that he knew if he repeated those figures here then I would jump down his throat (which I would).
In the Sky interview below Toby Young argues with Michael Rosen about ‘O’ levels and again trots out the discredited 2000 PISA figures. He also says that the 2009 PISA figures showed that UK was behind countries such as Estonia, Poland and Latvia. Again, Toby is wrong. Latvia was below UK and was also below the OECD average in Reading, Maths and Science. UK, on the other hand, was at the OECD average in Reading and Maths, and ABOVE AVERAGE in Science. Apologies for shouting but the accurate figures need repeating if they are to be heard above loud voices that misrepresent the data and, of course, forget the 2007 Trends in Maths and Science Survey which showed English pupils at the top of the European League in Maths and Science at ages 10 and 14.
http://news.sky.com/home/politics/article/16250644
Toby also said in the Sky interview that 75% of Singapore children gain ’0′ level passes. It’s unclear whether that is 75% of ALL Singapore children or 75% of those entered for ‘O’ level. There is another exam in Singapore – the ‘N’ level which covers technical subjects. What proportion of Singapore 16 year-olds enter ‘N’ level and ‘O’ level? Perhaps Toby can let us know with links to the evidence.
Further information about international tests and the exam systems in high-performing countries is in Frequently Asked Questions above (with links to evidence). You will see that only Singapore retains the ‘O’/'A’ level system – even Hong Kong has abandoned them this year and replaced them with a single graduation exam.
I’m replying to myself here, but it might help Toby with his research into whether the percentage ‘O’ level pass rate for Singapore means the percentage of all 16 year-olds or the percentage of ‘O’ level candidates.
A press release from the Ministry of Education, Singapore, says that in 2011 81% of 35,955 ‘O’ level candidates gained 5 or more GCE ‘O’ level passes. GCE is not like GCSE, an ‘O’ level pass = GCSE grade C. Anything less, and the ‘O’ level candidate fails. In GCSE any candidate gaining below a C can still be awarded a grade D-G. It costs money to enter candidates for examinations therefore it is unlikely that Singapore schools would spend money entering candidates for ‘O’ level that had little chance of passing. It follows, then, that the ‘O’ level candidates in Singapore would be only those pupils who were thought capable of passing. A high success rate, therefore, would be expected.
‘O’ level candidates in Singapore are likely to be those who had been selected for the Normal Academic Stream at the end of primary school. Pupils not selected for the Academic Stream are placed in the N stream.
http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2012/01/results-of-the-2011-gce-o-level-examination.php
Janet
It’s unclear whether that is 75% of ALL Singapore children or 75% of those entered for ‘O’ level.
A total of 36,955 school candidates sat the 2011 GCE O-Level Examination and 36,904 or 99.9% have been awarded certificates.
http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2012/01/results-of-the-2011-gce-o-level-examination.php
Ricky – that doesn’t answer the question. 99.9% of the CANDIDATES passed one or more ’0′ levels, 95.3% gained three or more and 81% (as I said in my 9.46 am post) gained 5 or more GCE ‘O’ level passes.
However, the number of CANDIDATES is not the same as the total number of 16 year-olds in the 2011 cohort. My question to Toby was: what would the percentage pass rate be if it was calculated as a proportion of the total cohort many of which would not have taken ‘O’ level.
In the UK the majority of pupils take GCSE – these are pupils of all abilities not just those deemed capable of passing C or above. In Singapore, only those pupils deemed capable of taking ‘O’ level would be entered – to enter pupils who had little or no chance of passing (ie gaining a C grade) would be wasting the entrance fee.
In England 2011 58.2% achieved 5 or more GCSEs C or above including Maths and English. That seems low when compared with Singapore but it’s important to remember that that 58.2% is the proportion of all GCSE candidates (which include those NOT deemed capable of achieving C) ie the whole ability range. The Singapore percentage was based on those deemed capable of achieving a C – ie the high achievers only.
The only meaningful comparison would be to compare the Singapore percentage pass rate at ‘O’ level with the percentage of English high achievers who gained 5+ GCSEs including Maths and English. For that we’d need to know the number of GCSE candidates who were deemed capable of achieving a C grade.
http://www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/rsgateway/search.pl?keyw=066&q2=Search
Janet
I think you will find I have answered your point lower down.
Of the latest batch of primary leavers, around 70% went straight onto the O-level track. At some later date they will be joined by the best of the normals.
75% of the birth-year cohort would be in the ballpark.
Toby – ‘O’ and ‘N’ level exams in Singapore have been reformed to give more emphasis on speaking, listening and that subject, much-maligned in some quarters, media literacy.
http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC120419-0000083/MOE-revises-English-Language-O-and-N-level-exam-formats
Singapore’s secondary education is described below. There’s also an Express Stream leading direct to ‘O’ level as well as Normal (Academic) and (Normal) Technical (both these leading to ‘N’ level exams and then if the pupil has done well enough to ‘O’ level). So my comment above needs amending: ‘O’ level candidates in Singapore are those from the Express Stream (chosen at the end of primary) and those from the Normal Academic Stream and Normal Technical Stream who scored sufficiently highly in the ‘N’ level exams which are taken at the end of 4 years (but not by Express Stream students).
So, this confirms my contention that only Singapore high achievers are entered for ‘O’ level hence the high pass rate.
http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/secondary/courses/
Toby (other readers can stop reading if they’re rather fed up with reading about Singapore, but I want to give Toby as much help as possible to solve the problem about whether the figure he quotes is the % pass rate at ‘O’ level for candidates only or the pass rate for the entire cohort of 16 year-olds. It’s important because he’s using this pass rate to “prove” that ‘O’ levels are better than GCSE.).
In 2011, 12,244 Singapore Normal Academic stream pupils took Normal Academic exams. 5,675 Singapore Normal Technical stream pupils took Normal Technical exams. Pass rates were 99.6% and 98.2% respectively. These exams are taken after 4 years of secondary school.
Of the above, 8,895 were deemed eligible for promotion to Secondary Year 5 (Normal Academic stream).
In 2011, 4,224 Normal Academic students took ‘O’ level (presumably these are included in the numbers I gave at 9.46 am).
But there’s a further problem – how many NA or NT students didn’t enter any exams? Would this lower Toby’s % pass rate if non-exam takers were included?
I don’t know – it’s over to Toby now. And please show calculations.
http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2011/12/results-of-the-2011-gce-n-level.php
Janet
I think you might be surprised at the relative sizes of the Express and Normal cohorts.
A total of 45,261 Primary 6 pupils sat for the PSLE this year. Among these pupils, 44,106 pupils (or 97.4%) are assessed as suitable to proceed to secondary school. In terms of course eligibility, 62.9% are eligible for the Express course, 23.1% for the Normal (Academic) and 11.4% for the Normal (Technical) course.
http://app.singaporeedu.gov.sg/asp/common/extlink.asp?url=http://www.moe.gov.sg/corporate/secondary.htm
This shows that around 70% go straight into the O-level stream, which is later added to by stronger performers from the Normal cohorts.
It looks to me that Toby Young was, therefore, right to say 75% or thereabouts of ALL Singapore pupils take O-levels and you lot owe him an apology.
…sorry…. I see I have twice said around 70%, when the figure is nearer 63%.
The actual numbers sitting the exam are in my first link and a typical cohort size is in my second. Haven’t got time to work out the actual percentage right now….. but may get back to it later. If you want to do the maths:
A total of 36,955 school candidates sat the 2011 GCE O-Level Examination .
A birth year cohort looks to be around 45k.
Looks to me MORE than 75%.
There’s also a track called ‘special’ , but I haven’t yet found figures for that.
Ricky – it’s nice to see your doing some research rather than falling back on trotting out tabloid prejudices. However, see my 12.30 pm post – it will save you some time.
Ricky – Toby Young might indeed be right but there is too much doubt around these figures to say that categorically. Unfortunately, Toby has a habit of trotting out dodgy data which has been refuted on this site before.
An added complication is that the number of pupils taking ‘O’ level in Singapore (about 37,000) is very small when compared with the number taking GCSE in England (650,000). Are we comparing like with like? How similar is Singapore to England? Is a comparison between Singapore and England as meaningless as, say, a comparison between an advantaged and disadvantaged area? I don’t know the answer to this.
In any case, Singapore, although a high-achiever in the PISA tables, was still beaten by Shanghai, Finland, Korea and Hong Kong. See FAQs above for details of their exam systems. The Singapore figures were used by Toby Young to underpin his support for ‘O’ levels, yet the four jurisdications that came higher than Singapore in the PISA tables do not use a system similar to ‘O’ levels.
Finally, I write for myself, Ricky, so to make remarks about “you lot” is presumptuous.
Janet
I appreciate that you are writing for yourself, but I think you also recognize that on this thread there has been a degree of ganging-up on Toby Young to accuse him of being misleading.
Much of this has focused on scorning his assertion that three-quarters of Singapore students pass O-levels.
Without quibbling over minor details, the evidence seems broadly to vindicate what young says. I suspect that you (…like me) assumed that the ‘Normal’ track in Singapore would be the largest and the ‘Express’ would be the equivalent of our Higher Achievers (leaving primary with level 5 scores).
It turns out that the Express is by far the largest track. It also turns out that around 37,000 pupils take O-levels each year in Singapore and that each birth-year cohort is around 45,000.
We should all at least acknowledge that Toby Young was not being ‘misleading’.
How similar is Singapore to England?
Well, unlike Finland, Korea and China, Singapore teaches in the English language and uses a UK-based examining board. Singapore has a higher GDP per capita than the UK as a whole, but would probably be quite close to, say, London and the South East.
I think you’re rather clutching at straws here to avoid acknowledging that Toby was right after all. And also to avoid facing up to the implication of what he says: that Francis and others suggest that O-levels are an ‘élite’ qualification suited only to a minority of students.
Actually, this need not be the case. They could be designed to suit more than two thirds of the student population – that would encompass all who are on the academic track to university – and then some.
I don’t think there’s any ganging up at all Ricky. Here we have a small handful of people exploring there individual concerns about Young. Paul Smith’s effort is particularly good.
If you want to see ganging up in action on a forum, trying going on another education forum where you can see what happens when gangs of people text round each other to aggressively discredit a participant by posting in a particular way. Of course on a good day they only post benign spam to make it impossible to contributors to make points.
There is no ganging up on anyone going on on this site Ricky and I wouldn’t bother stepping in to try and defend Toby if I were you. He clearly loves negative attention.
Rebecca
The point is he was right.
Francis – sorry to have hijacked this thread by talking about Singapore but Toby was so adamant about the figures that I felt I had to follow it up. As far as your TV interview was concerned – I’d rather see some honest passion than misrepresentation.
On Newsnight Toby advocated that everybody should do iGCSEs as these were more rigorous. Do you know Janet whether any proper academic study has been done to compare IGCSEs with GCSEs?
Ofqual compared GCSE and iGCSE in English, Maths, French and Science (double award) in 2006, so it’s out-of-date now. This is what Ofqual reported at the time:
“In all four subjects there were major differences between the IGCSEs and the GCSE
examinations in the same subject. In almost every case, these differences meant that the IGCSE examinations did not meet the GCSE subject criteria in significant ways. The GCSE criteria are tightly bound up with key stage 4 programmes of study in England Hence, where those differences were found to occur, the IGCSE cannot be regarded as assessing the relevant programme of study to the extent that the GCSE does. This probably reflects the different contexts in which the IGCSEs were developed.”
“In all four subjects there were also marked differences between the two IGCSE
syllabuses. These were usually as large as – or larger than – the differences between the IGCSEs and the comparator GCSEs. This means it is not possible to come to any general conclusion about the utility of IGCSE in England as an alternative to GCSE in a given subject; rather, each time, one would have to consider both syllabuses.”
“There were differences between the GCSEs, but these tended to be minor.”
http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/files/qca-06-2974_gcse_igcse_compared.pdf
This is the same OfQual that claimed that exams were as rigourous as they ever were …. repeatedly ….. presumably ?
iGCSE is perceived as being more “challenging”. However, this 2010 TES article suggests that they might not be. In any case, it’s probably about time GCSE was scrapped and pupils graduated at 18 with a Graduation Diploma as they do in most of the world’s highest performing countries (see new thread).
http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6055169
Actually up to today that is the only article I had ever seen but have just found this on the internet which seems to suggest that one of the exam boards who deliver IGCSEs does not believe that there is any difference in difficulty.
http://ask.cie.org.uk/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1035&PARTITION_ID=1&TIMEZONE_OFFSET=&USERTYPE=1&CMD=PRINT_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=5448
I think the mistake is assuming the problems of GCSEs can be fixed by changing it to a Diploma, O/CSE, some new tripartite system, or anything else. It’s a consequence of countless other problems.
The University of Cambridge International Examinations made the following points about iGCSE in 2007:
1 iGCSEs were developed for international use because GCSE was perceived as unsuitable for international schools because of its “anglo-centricity”.
2 iGCSE and GCSE have equivalent academic demands or “standards” although they are significantly different in syllabus content and schemes of assessment.
3 Coursework was optional in iGCSE because it would have been difficult for international centres to offer coursework. In GCSE coursework was compulsory in most subjects at the time.
4 “Grade for grade” they are aligned to UK GCSE standards.
http://www.cie.org.uk/docs/recognition/Recognition%20and%20Equivalency%20Help%20Pack%20Feb%2004.pdf
In maths iGCSEs are not more rigorous. They have less of a language component. This means that there are less questions which are ‘in contexts’. Some private schools have chosen to do it because they did not want to bother to prepare their students for there being more questions in contexts as there now on the main GCSE.
This doesn’t make it a better exam. It just makes it easier to access for students with very weak English.
Surely if Mr Gove is so desperate to prove that his own children are so much cleverer than anyone elses then all he has to do is create A***,A****,A******,A****** GCSE grades.
His proposal to prevent any english literature texts being taken into O=levels is ridiculously half-baked …I sat my o-levels in 1984 and we took our texts in .
Still I have to say , after the expose on the exam boards admitting they make their curriculums easy to get the exam contract then I’m on his side to prevent competition amongst exam boards. Any thoughts on that ?
After teacher strikes, head teacher strikes and Unison strikes it seems it’s now appropraite to have a an nati-o-levle parents strike…..round about ofsted inspections would seem best.
err that is to say “it’s now appropriate to have a an anti-o-level parents strike…..round about ofsted inspections would seem best”….(1984 was a long time ago ).
Surely Singapores exam results have a little something to do with the much stronger embrace of education by chinese parenting culture?
I don’t think you should go on the box when you are feeling low Francis… getiing cut out by a BBC interviewer who negates your statement about ‘facist Singapore’ and asks you to retract it must count as some kind of low. I know you are passionate but I don’t think this really is helping you case.
Also I am not really sure that new O levels are a bad idea if you let children choose whether or not to do them and continue to offer other pathways which actually lead to something else worth having…which could include more teacher based assessed alternatives.
Perhaps you or someone else on LSN need to give us a clear statement about compulsory attendance at local comprehensive schools and how this is not totalitarian.
You really haven’t grasped the issue have you?
I really don’t think Gove is even bothering to pretend that his fake “choice” extends to children themselves choosing whether they get to sit ‘O’ Levels. The wheat is separated from the chaff, who are condemned from school age to sit CSE exams which mark you out and brand you as third rate and inferior.
Finland doesn’t offer a phony plethora of “choice” and they get amazing results. I wouldn’t call them totalitarian, would you?
Exams are supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The real issue is of course, given that GCSE is already a two tier system (academically regarded and non academically regarded subjects), how to replace it.
Alarmist suggestions that their replacement will be a return to the 1950s are just that, if only because such a course of action would be politically inexpedient..
So, rather than just bleating about the inequity of it all, why not suggest something useful?
For myself, in an increasingly mobile, global marketplace, I would like to see the adoption of an international examination board so that all employers, not just British, can judge the merits of British youth.
You back Tim? I thought you’d had enough?!
I certainly back Tim if you are referring to a previous contributor on other threads.
Though clearly not part of any educational establishment, I thought that a lot of what he had to say had the twin merits of objectivity and common sense.
A couple of thoughts for you:
Check this out for common sense and moderation:
http://www.oph.fi/download/135542_learning_and_competence_2020.pdf
Then, to illustrate the massive problem we have in this country about making progress on education, consider that Scotland has the same population as Finland. Perfect! Why don’t we simply put the Finnish system of education in place in Scotland and then roll it out across the rest of the country if it is successful?
Practically, given our political system, how is that ever going to happen?
Tim Bidie, Pascal Sansbouclier, Oswald Armstrong….same right wing Rottweiler, new disguise.
Right wing Rottweiler – I love it. I have no idea what Mr Bidie or that profound philosopher ‘de nos jours’, Pascal Sansbouclier, did to deserve such a sobriquet but I say thank you and well done to them for their most stimulating contributions.
As for the intemperate Mr Beavis, other commentators more informed and articulate than I seem to have got his measure.
Referring to one of your many split personalities here as a philosopher is just laughable. As is hiding behind assumed names to do little but undermine and attack. A coward do nos jours might be more approproate measure of what you are “Tim Bidie”.
“The real issue is of course, given that GCSE is already a two tier system (academically regarded and non academically regarded subjects), how to replace it.”
The real issue is, Oswald, that there is not issue whereby anything needs to change in the very short term and certainly not in the life of this parliament. This is just another crazy idea which Gove has pulled out of nowhere in direct contradiction to the advice he gets from his advisers who are actually connected to education.
What, you mean like they don’t listen to failed Maths teachers who are matey with idiot MPs who think 3/10 is 60% ?
I like Francis Gilbert’s books ; I have, I think all of them. He talks a lot of sense.
However, he came over as a total plonker on the interview.
And whether Singapore is a fascist state or not, I don’t know personally, this affects the arguments over its educational effectiveness how exactly ?
Rebecca, Thank you for your response. The GCSE has been discredited in the eyes of many parents for quite some time so I think even just changing the name would be a step in the right direction. A lot of reaction to the suggestion of exam changes seems premature. I await details of the proposed replacement with interest.
I have believed for some time that moving to an international exam board would, at one stroke, take a great deal of the politics out of our educational system.
Alas, of course, that is precisely why such a move is unlikely to happen.
And so orates Tim Bidie. Do you honestly think you are convincing us that education policy is not politically motivated and that Gove is not risking the future lives of children as he recklessly positions himself for power? You are more deluded than I thought. try Yellow Lion as your next “nom de plumes” old chap!
Well that might be the reason.
Or there might be other good reasons such as the need to create exams which are relevant to our students their futures.
Which MP was that?
The ‘which MP was that?’ comment was a reply to Paul. I’d be curious to have a link.
Oswald are you expressing the view that the qualifications our students take should be irrelevant to the knowledge they need and to their future lives? I understand that this is a strong viewpoint which some people hold. Personally I don’t mind students doing some abstract academic study but I do feel that most need to so some things of some relevant to them and their futures as well.
“Oswald” of course attempts to deflect focus away from the fact that O Levels and CSE clearly condemn a section of young people into underachievers pretty much for life. It is somewhat facetious for him to claim that GCSEs already do this because academic=worthwhile non-academic=worthless since students can mix and match and these exams are inclusive. Above all, CSEs are not qualifications you would want. GCSEs are.
What Tim Bidie under his new pseudonym here has always wanted is an education system that separates from early years the advantaged (private schools, grammar schools, O Levels, university, top job) from the rest (sink schools, CSE, minimum wage slave/dole) so that the latter can be further demonised and kicked senseless by Cameron and the other Tories for being a drain on the state.
I wonder how long this social apartheid can continue before anger spills over into violence. But seeing as Cameron is looking more and more like a one term Prime Minister and this appalling Tory led coalition a one term government, we may be spared more riots.
Well, no they aren’t. No-one views low grade GCSEs (D downwards) as having any values. Interestingly, my daughter did GCSE Science and we were able to compare her GCSE Chemistry test paper with a 1984 CSE paper my wife had done.
No doubt which was more rigourous and had more chemistry in it.
Well, give yourself a little pat on your smug little back Paul, count your blessings and encourage your children to sneer and spit upon those officially deemed stupid and undeserving. You might feel more at home in “fascist” Singapore. Ever thought of moving? You would save on taxes too.
Look on the bright side Allan. if Michael Gove ever became Leader of the Conservative Party, they would be in oblivion for another 13 years.
Lower grades in maths are valued Paul.
In general an employer would much rather see a list of the grades a student actually got than just hear that they failed everything – leaving them with no ability to discriminate between candidates in that category.
Not very clever. So, Tim, you retire Bidie Troll to replace him Oswald/Pascal Troll? And how is it possible to attack someone with opprobrium when that someone hides himself behind a series of fake identifies?!
No CSEs do not exist but they – or their equivalent – will return with ‘O’ Levels. Has Tim/Pascal/Oswald/Yellow Lion not actually understood this?!
Well we do know what will replace them. This is the whole point of the debate. Did you not realise Gove is planning to replace GCSE with O Levels and an equivalent if not facsimile of CSE. If you did realise, are you trolling ln behalf of the dictators at the DfE? Is that why you hide behind names?
Tim
It was the Daily Mail with the leak that “Education secretary Michael Gove has drawn up plans to overhaul the entire exam system and curriculum. Proposals to axe GCSEs and return to an O-level style exams will ensure an education system that compares with most rigorous in the world, Michael Gove told MPs.”
This doesn’t look “vague” to me. And with enough opposition in and out of both houses of Parliament, you are quite right that we won’t be returning to the 1950s.
We are most certainly exercising our democratic right to protest and it looks like busted trolls like you don’t like it and entirely lose their rags! At least Francis for.angry with very good reason. What is your excise Lily Liver (try that for your new name)!
Wow!! The Right Wing Rottweiler completely loses it and goes foul-mouthed crackers!
The Daily Mail broke the story. All the media, including the broadsheets have followed it up, Bidie. So prevalent is the news that your denial of it verges on being the exams equivalent of the Holocaust denial! If the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Guardian, BBC, Independent are all lying then why did John Bercow summon Give to Parliament and why did Gove not deny it but confirm it by giving explanations?
Oh dear, Tim Bidie!
You’re so rattled now you’ve gone unhinged! No wonder you need to hide your identity.
Gove’s “leak” revealed no so much a “proposal” than a plan hatched in secret from government colleagues. A plan so divisive and alarming that he is under pressure to explain his econduct and even the course of his entire education policy.
Even Senior Tories are sceptical about this. Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the Commons education select committee, suggested that the plans were designed just to help the elite, adding that “This has come out of the blue. Just a year ago the government was ramping up its new GCSE target and now a year on we are having this change – back to the future, back to O-levels.” He has announced that his committee will be summoning Gove to explain himself as well.
And here you are denying this is going on? For once the Daily Mail didn’t leak porkie pies. Despite the evidence and summonses, you go on the rampage here denying it all. The Rabid Right Wing let loose. Makes the Loony Left look like a knitting circle.
“dissenting voices are regularly silenced, and you can get jailed for very minor infringements of the law”
If this is a definition of ‘fascism’ then do we live in one ?
I think it was Marc-Antoine Jullien writing in the 19th Century about comparative education who was interested in evaluating good educational practices around the globe yet cautioned against borrowing aspects of them for transfer to other education systems. The process, he suggested, is very complex and therefore I think it should only be entered into by those who have taken a long hard look at the context – economic, social, historical, political and so on.
Singapore is one example. I don’t think citing wonderful results from a percentage of children sitting O levels in Singapore is at all helpful to the debate about what is the most useful way to reform the UK education system. For starters, the Singapore context is entirely different. Singapore is a tiny country with few natural resources. It is a knowledge-based economy and the education system, designed to drive such an economy, is entirely meritocratic. It is also premised on the notion that, to benefit the country, critical evaluations of the system, based on the country’s needs, will take place regularly. Thus, re-training at all levels takes place frequently, and most importantly, no expense is spared to get the system right.
Education is not based on the ability to pay, nor is school admission based primarily on post codes and parental choices. The majority of Singaporean primary school students sit a national Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) at the end of what we would call Year 6. This is based on four core subjects: Maths, Science, English and a second language (mainly Tamil and other regional Indian languages and Mandarin and Malay). The children are marked on a points system, and, based on the number of marks they get, they can choose from three streams – as discussed in previous threads. Those who make it to the Express or gifted streams get into schools with the finest resources, greatest subject choices and often, the best teachers.
When my children attended Singapore’s schools, the emphasis was on Science subjects. These had the highest status so academically able children were channelled into the Science streams and the less able were channelled into the Arts streams.
A few of these schools are ‘independent’ – i.e. they charge fees but these are very low; I think for Singaporean parents the fees are around 290 Singaporean dollars a month and for poor families whose children get in, full scholarships are awarded. In other words, no one is turned away based on the inability to pay.
In Singapore, the ethos surrounding education is largely different from here. For example, failure brings shame on the whole family; it is not seen as an essential part of learning. There are also few second chances. It is a particularly tough system for children with special needs. However, I think that teachers in Singapore are highly respected – possibly much more so than in the UK. Certainly when we educated our children through that system, I much enjoyed the celebration of teachers through the annual teachers’ day. This was the chance for all of us to say thank you. The children put on shows and took flowers and cards to show their appreciation. We parents showed our respect by allowing teachers to get on with the job. Teachers also had much more of a mentoring role. My youngest son, who now lives in Seattle, still corresponds with his mentor.
I’m not sure that much of this system would work here – different context entirely.
I also think that perhaps we are focusing on the wrong issues. It does not actually matter what exams are called as long as they are designed to meet the needs of the 21st century and beyond, and as long as they do not discriminate in a favour of a few. This isn’t just about rigour; it’s also about the way questions can be skewed to favour some children from particular backgrounds over others.
I suggest that perhaps a key problem in this discussion has to be the way some contributors describe children – for example “separating the wheat from the chaff” is surely pretty cruel and condemnatory. No children are chaff. They are all wheat. But if they are labelled as chaff, they will be. There are incredible stories coming out of all schools – whatever the type – about children succeeding because teachers believe they have the innate ability even if some exam results do not yet tell their story.
Another problem I suggest is that the current education system has ensured that what and how children learn is mindlessly boring. Creativity and critical thinking have gone missing. And how many able children have been lost and poorly served by our system because they are not prepared to engage with subjects that are grindingly dull! Children learn when curiousity has been caught. They will also learn when they are allowed to experiment and possibly, on occasion, to fail. This inability to allow failure in order for children to develop and grow was one criticism we had of Singapore’s education system. But Singapore is beginning to move away from the more traditional, transmission style of education to one that facilitates creativity, critical thinking and independence. It is also beginning to embrace more of the liberal arts including music and drama.
Worryingly, we seem to be moving in the other direction.
Thank you, Georgina, for your detailed first-hand account of Singapore’s education system. You highlight differences between Singapore and the UK as regards education:
1 The emphasis on success which can lead to stress. In a 2010 speech, Senior Parliamentary Secretary Mr Masagos Zulkifli said the Singapore primary curriculum had been cut by 30% to lighten curriculum load. He said extra tuition was unnecessary if a pupil was attentive in class. However, he counteracted this by saying that such tuition was a tradition in Asian societies, and dealing with stress was a useful life skill. It is, but not when it becomes intolerable.
http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/speeches/2010/03/10/fy-2010-committee-of-supply-de-3.php
2 The high esteem given to teachers. Compare this with England where the Government and certain sections of the media constantly rubbish teachers in state education.
3 “The overload of information has put a premium on the ability to do critical analysis”, so said Dr Ng Eng Hen, Minister of Education, Singapore, 2008 (OECD below). Singapore is moving from knowledge transmission to a curriculum emphasising creativity and self-directed learning. Compare this with the press release trumpeting the draft Programmes of Study for primary schools – this stressed the knowledge base. Also compare this with the desire to return to ‘O’ levels which require no coursework which is, at its best, self-directed learning.
The OECD found that the shared consensus in Singapore about the purposes of education makes it possible for policies to be in place long enough to have any impact. Compare this with England where education is buffeted by constantly changing initiatives put in place by ambitious politicians whose main concern is their own careers.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/50/46623978.pdf
“Well, give yourself a little pat on your smug little back Paul, count your blessings and encourage your children to sneer and spit upon those officially deemed stupid and undeserving. You might feel more at home in “fascist” Singapore. Ever thought of moving? You would save on taxes too.”
So, nothing resembling an argument then ?
I am actually in favour of a tripartite system as they have in parts of Europe. I agree with most of the criticisms of O-Levels/CSEs. However, GCSEs are unfit for purpose as well.
We do not actually yet know what Gove is planning, I believe.
I think the press have been leaked enough and Clegg certainly knows. Are you part of the damage limitation/denial troll team as well?
You said we do not know what Gove is planning. We do. It was leaked and he hasn’t denied it.
All the people you thought were paid Gove agents are Labour supporters. The only Tory among them is me. A couple of them are very definitely left wingers.
However, they did find it very funny.
Not as funny as your claims to be targeted by Israel, but then that would be an achievement.
There are very few staunch Tories on the forum regulars, probably less than a dozen. Of those dozen many criticise Gove. Most of the other posters do as well ; on the Opinion front page there are invariably at least 3 or 4 threads which are criticising Gove.
It’s not them, it’s not paid agents of Gove or the Tories, it’s you.
Can you take this exchange back to the other forum, wherever it might be. Thanks.
Ricky – reply to your comment above about Toby Young being right about Singapore and its ‘O’ level pass rate.
If he was right, (and I stress “was”), then if you read my posts you will find they were a serious of questions. I see no reason to apologise for asking questions and seeking answers. Surely questioning and critical thinking are skills which Toby Young would encourage at WLFS.
You ignore the two “facts” loudly proclaimed by Toby Young on Sky – UK falling down league tables since 2000 (which uses figures the OECD has warned shouldn’t be used for comparison) and Latvia being higher up the PISA league tables than UK (it isn’t). Given Toby Young’s repetition of these “facts”, then it is quite legitimate to question any other stats he may give.
Suppose, however, he was right about Singapore. He was wrong about the other two. That’s 1 possibly correct fact v 2 incorrect ones.
Not very good, is it? Would this merit an ‘O’ level pass?
*Radio 4′s “More or Less” found there had been grade inflations, whereas FullFact found the evidence inconclusive.
Janet,
I thought you had admitted on a previous thread that the only conclusion that could be drawn from the 2000 data that we had slipped down the league tables? Had you forgotten the statement made the director of OECD / Pisa that the this was only conclusion that could be drawn.
Perhaps it’s your memory playing tricks with you?
I can only speak for my own subjects, but the grade inflation is obvious. In fact I can remember picking up the first 16+ papers in the late 1980s (this was the trial for the GCSE the next year which was identical) and wondering where the content had gone.
The A level papers that followed (because the GCSE subjects had changed they followed them) were even simpler.
This is a combination of
- friendlier marking
- wider but shallowed curriculum
- complex topics being replaced by simpler ones
- teachers cheating on assessment
- modular courses
- teachers teaching to pass exams not teaching the actual subject
The last named is why Francis’ idea won’t work. In an ideal world it would – this is what happened in my subject’s practical before GCSE. You gave the projects what you thought it was worth, and a sample was moderated. You did not have to produce shedloads of largely irrelevant ‘evidence’ that outweighed the actual project.
However, that was before league tables and the huge pressures they bought. With the internet and other modern communications I do not think it is possible to put the genie back in the bottle.
If the DfES do not collate them the papers will, locally anyway if not globally (assuming someone doesn’t set up a business collect them as happens with other statistics).
If some schools do not print them higher achieving schools will and conclusions will be drawn from the refusal to print them.
If you ban their printing then people will draw conclusions about the government that bans it, though this might work, possibly.
As regards the cheating comment, in my subject (ICT/Computing) the teachers cannot do the A2 practical tasks let alone the pupils (there are regular threads on this on the TES). To help people I gave out a worked explained model solution of the task to a few teachers a couple of years ago which then mushroomed all over the place. This had my name/email on it.
I got deluged with questions from pupils (from all over the place) asking questions about how it worked, but most commonly, oddly, asking the best way to memorise it.
Unsurprisingly I haven’t done it again, though the pleas for help carry on unabated.
Janet
….“facts” loudly proclaimed by Toby Young on Sky – UK falling down league tables since 2000 (which uses figures the OECD has warned shouldn’t be used for comparison)
I think the position relating to the PISA 2000 figures is more complex and nuanced than you allow with your use of words such as ‘faulty’ or phrases such as ‘shouldn’t be used for comparison’.
PISA did say that the response rate in 2000 was insufficient to do trend analysis with them. This is a particular statistical use. It doesn’t rule out any other general comparisons. In any case, PISA has made clear it was perhaps being excessively cautious on this point. Here’s what OECD says:
In PISA 2000, the initial response rate for the United Kingdom fell 3.7% short of the minimum requirement. At that time, the United Kingdom provided evidence to the PISA Consortium that permitted an assessment of the expected performance of the non-participating schools and on the basis of which the PISA Consortium concluded that the response-bias was likely negligible and the results were therefore … included in the international report. (my emphasis)
….. so, in summary: the PISA 2000 response-rate was initially judged inadequate. Subsequent investigations showed the deficiencies were likely negligible. On that basis they were accepted for publication, but a health warning was appended regarding their use for trends analysis, even though actually the error was too tiny to matter.
Toby Young was not engaged in any sophisticated trend modelling. He was giving a general view on SKY and Newsnight.
Oncew again, you are totally unjustified in accusing him of sharp practice or being negligently misleading.
http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_38262901_1_1_1_1,00.html
Complaints have been received concerning the operators of this website. Anyone who has further evidence to submit is encouraged to contact: inspector@ofcom.org.uk
Oh here we go. Old tactic. Nasty!
Suffice to say this in case it’s not blindingly obvious to all this is not a strategy Ofcom would actually use to investigate something like this.
Here is a link to one of the conversations I’ve been involved with in the US dept education research project into discussion forums in education which I was asked to take part in because the researchers were impressed by a substantial international maths education forum I’ve been running and moderating on my own for the last year.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Do-online-discussion-forums-produce-3847644.S.105213866?qid=d8e1ae1c-7a6f-4099-8408-42705fb019ec&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_3847644
Do you agree with an analysis of the ways in which Rogers and Buber’s conclusions are challenged by the dynamics of forums which allow multiple participants and the bridging of time? Do you have any other criticisms of any of the points I’ve made?
I still don’t really get why good exam results are A Bad Thing even if you don’t agree with the method of government of a country.
Q. Do you think that O-Levels are a bad method of examination?
A. Yes. Because Singapore is a fascist state.
Only a supporter of the GCSE system would think that that is a valid answer to the question!
No one who supports GCSEs is arguing that good exam results are a bad thing. The issue here is that Gove’s secret plans showed that he was planning to bring back an examination system which would effectively fail children who did not sit the ‘O’ Level but the CSE or its equivalent. Given that children would be herded off at around 14 or before to complete a syllabus geared towards either exam, those put forward for CSE will have been pre-selected to fail. They will spend the next two years in the humiliating and demotivating position of waiting to sit tests designed to stigmatise them as third rate failures destined for the scrap heap.
Good exam results are a good thing. But everyone should have a chance to do well in exams that everyone sits. O Levels are only good if you have been selected to sit them. Spare a thought for those who have been segregated away from them. They aren’t necessarily “thick” or undeserving. Every child has different needs and each child develops at different rates. It is pretty ghastly for a government to fix your ability to a yardstick and at an age they have prescribed.
If every child has different needs and each child develops at different rates, then why would you describe the GCSE as a good solution? Surely containing children within a rigid curriculum until 16 is even worse than allowing some separation at 14?!
A wide and comprehensive GCSE curriculum wouldn’t “contain” children. The narrow and exclusive curriculum favoured by Gove is what is rigid and what lays the foundation to separate the deserving from the undeserving. A child developing later or with with needs different than the standard would have been barred from sitting O Levels by the time they were 14. You think this is equitable?
It worries me that you think that any child is “undeserving”. All children deserve the right to succeed. I don’t see any evidence to suggest that assessment at 16 is any less arbitrary than at 14.
What sort of children do you happen to think are “undeserving”? It interests me.
Let me be clear. It is not me who is categorizing children as undeserving – it will be Gove doing this if he gets his way to segregate them into sitting the bottom tier of a two tier examination. It is clear from my first comment to you that I don’t agree with selection or segregation. You should therefore go and ask Gove why he plans to implement an exam system that punishes the undeserving, not me. Finally, exams taken at 16 are not “assessments” and you ignore the point that many children will follow a curriculum that would imprison them into the category of failure that is fixed and which gives them no hope of the brighter future accorded to those deemed good enough to sit ‘O’ Levels. Good bye.
To be clear, Allan Beavis is very likely to be a ‘Mr Nasty’ version of Francis Gilbert.
One way or another, he has a vested interest in the educational status quo, either through personal or commercial connections to the existing examination boards.
He is also involved in administrating this site so will embargo your comments if he starts to lose the argument, as he normally does.
He never provides any evidence for any of his wild assertions because he is not very technically adept, so too busy struggling with his antiquated IT.
He has long since foregone any right to be taken seriously.
I advise serious commentators here to concentrate on the more sensible offerings from other commentators or to move across to the BBC Daily Politics website which, I understand, has a very good new debating website under construction, as we speak.
“But everyone should have a chance to do well in exams that everyone sits.”
I’ve worked with autistic children ; everything from zero communication/educational/social skills to children who were just ‘a bit odd’ ; how does this work ?
An exam everyone succeeds in is intrinsically worthless. Children understand this even if you don’t. It doesn’t have to be academic. It can be life skills. It can be vocational. You can have lower examinations so that those who aren’t academic can show they have the basic numeracy and literacy skills that allow them to function competently in the world.
Mathematics, for example, does not have to be Algebra. You can teach budgeting to those who do not have the ability to conceptualise algebra. You can teach life skills – how to fill in forms rather than poetry in English.
It is important that all these are open to all pupils, but it is idiotic to say they should all learn the same things and be tested about the same things.
What was wrong with the O-Level/CSE system wasn’t the examinations. It was the inflexibility in placement and the refusal to provide a proper funded alternative curriculum for those who did not have academic skills. Actually much the same as the system you are defending where children ended up doing limited watered down versions of the higher qualifications.
Pretending that people like this do not exist and that they benefit from watered down academic exams like GCSE is like pretending the world is flat.
Good exam results are only good if they actually represent an achievement. Whether this is Latin or making a high quality dovetail joint should only matter from the point of view of future education and which employment sectors they enter.
Paul – sitting the same exam doesn’t imply that all candidates must pass at the same standard. That was the advantage of GCSE when it first began – all children could sit GCSE but performance was graded A-G with A being outstanding, C being above average, E being the grade which was expected of the average pupil and G showing below-average performance but, importantly, demonstrating that the pupil had completed the course (ie done the requisite coursework and not dropped out of school). Unfortunately, the calls for more pupils to reach GCSE C (once above average) results in the exam becoming “intrinsically worthless”, as you rightly say, if everyone “succeeds”.
Most of the world’s top performing countries have a final graduation diploma at 18. These are intended to show what an individual pupil knows, understands and can do, just as GCSE was originally intended to do (but at age 16). See the other thread about scrapping GCSE for discussion about this or look at the summary in FAQs above about how countries that perform well in PISA organise their exam systems.
I would agree with much of this, but I would rather that children who were clearly non-academic had an exam and curriculum which was tailored to their needs, rather than producing a low level academic exam.
So much is in the implementation. I think your idea is fine and well worth trying, but I know how it will be implemented because I’ve seen it my entire time in education. It deteriorates into waffle. I remember picking up two TVEI folders (an early tech. programme) one for a star A level pupil, one for a child who was, well, very dense. Really nice kid, tried very very hard, harder than any kid I’ve worked with since, but just couldn’t do it (I had to teach him Maths). It was rather difficult to tell the folders apart.
Every other system I have seen like this has the same problem, in fact it gets worse. The root cause is that people are loathe to make the statement “A is a significantly higher achiever than B” simply.
I don’t think the innumerable faults in education are to do with the GCSE, or a Diploma you see. If you implemented your idea, you’d just have the same problems retrofitted into something else. We need to fix the rest of it then use your idea otherwise I fear it will be wasted.
It’s like the Diplomas Labour tried to introduce. High quality vocational stuff on equal levels with academic skills. Equal value, different skills. Great idea, yes please.
But the implementation was often abysmal (for a while I refused to believe the IT one actually was the IT one because only about a quarter of the topics were actual IT skills !)
Children love to excel, even the most behaviourally challenged. One of the side effects of the shift to GCSEs for this group was they lost the exams they could actually do well in (we used to have EBD boys doing needlework and they liked it !) because they were replaced by wordy waffly subjects which required lots of writing which they couldn’t do.
So instead of making a table, you designed it, conducted surveys about it, measured it, chose environmentally friendly materials etc. There was very little for those who could make a good table but couldn’t write four pages about why.
“All children deserve the right to succeed”
Really ? I might agree with a comment like “all children deserve the chance to succeed”.
But the “right” to succeed ?
Suppose they spend 13 odd years in school throwing chairs and telling teachers to XXXX off, despite continuous expensive intervention. Do they still have that ‘right’ ?
“Good exam results are a good thing. But everyone should have a chance to do well in exams that everyone sits”
So you don’t support GCSEs then ? I ask, because my 17 year old daughter had chosen on several occasions whether to do ‘higher tier’ (an A-D grade) or ‘lower tier’ (C down grade), and was not able to do both (in Science I would happily have coughed up for this) so that’s not really ‘exams everyone sits’ is it ?
“My background is in teaching challenging classes of teenagers and that’s clearly one of the reasons I feel so comfortable in chaotic and confrontational forums”
Yes, definitely. I remember what you were like on the TES forum (I know you think it is all the TES posters and not you ; you know since you left deletions have gone back to virtually none again, odd that). Obviously your Mathematics does not extend to Occam’s Razor.
I notice in your references you don’t suggest linking to the discussions of your ‘challenging classes’ in the TES forums.
I particularly remember your suggestion that in dealing with a child who has been upset by another difficult child, you advocated sending the upset child out into the corridor, getting the class working independently, and then going out to talk to them.
As was pointed out to you this suggests your ‘challenging classes’ are nothing of the kind. In fact, you described them as ‘borderline ‘C’ grade’. Those of us who have dealt with seriously challenging children for years are aware that while many of them are quite able, because they are seriously challenging they haven’t done much work in school, so while they may have the latent ability to be such they are so short of actual skills and knowledge that such is extremely difficult.
Another poster quoted both your exam results for the year (which were not what you claimed) and your SEN numbers (which were very low). Which you didn’t like, I recall.
Guest – reply to post above asking me if I’d forgotten what Andreas Schleicher had said about UK performance in the PISA league tables in ten years. As you say, we’ve discussed this before but I’ll repeat it:
In the interview below Schleicher said little had changed in UK’s PISA performance in ten years – it was an average performer overall. Mr Schleicher didn’t say that UK was above-average in one of the three subjects tested: Science. This was a pity. Neither did he say, regrettably, that his own organisation had warned about making comparisons between the 2000 figures and those of 2009.
http://www.ippr.org/research-project/44/7131/creating-a-world-class-school-system-for-england?showupdates=1&layout_type=updates
John Jerrim, Research Officer at the Institute of Education, wrote in his working paper (Dec 2011) that one couldn’t conclude that the performance of English secondary children had improved or declined compared with other countries over ten years. The decline in PISA rankings was “not statistically robust enough to base public policy upon” (see link for details).
http://www.ioe.ac.uk/Study_Departments/J_Jerrim_qsswp1109.pdf
Janet
I have answered this point further up – only having done so did I notice it might have been more appropriate for anyone trying to follow threads of argument through all the bickering about Rebecca’s TES days to put it here. So please see my 25/06/12 at 10:16
So it’s nothing to do with your publicly naming and shaming OFSTED Inspectors repeatedly then ?
Given your extensive history of delusional dishonesty, mind, I’d take it more seriously if you said you’d been kidnapped by aliens.
Again, not the slightest consideration that it might be your fault !
Perhaps it’s time to recap before the thread degenerates into a tedious re-run of who-said-what-to-whom-on-TES. That’s not what this thread is about. It is about Toby Young crowing about Francis Gilbert’s momentary loss of temper.
To recap: Toby Young may not have lost his temper but he again used figures known to be flawed. He also got it wrong about Latvia. His comparison of GCSE pass rates and ‘O’ level pass rates in Singapore may, or may not, be valid. When someone sniggers, as he is doing, about a hot-tempered lapse in a fellow panellist, he should perhaps remember his own deliberate repetition of dodgy data.
Janet
Why do you keep saying TY’s Singapore point “may or may not be valid”. We’ve seen the figures. Toby was right. Admit it and let’s move on to what that tells us about our own problems in England….
That’s not a “recap”, that’s a restatement of the views. Calling the figures flawed is “poisoning the well” something wonderfully described by Nigel Hawthorne in Yes Minister.
Whilst I agree a direct comparison with Singapore is not conclusive of anything it is not nonsense either and it is vastly superior to calling Singapore a fascist state.
Paul – recap also means to summarise, review with a short summary.
I didn’t make it clear which figures repeated by Toby Young are known to be flawed. I wrongly assumed readers would know that the flawed figures were the 2000 PISA results for the UK. The 2000 figures have been found to be faulty by the OECD who published the figures in the first instance but then withdrew them because of problems discovered at a later date.
Your conclusion about Singapore, ie that the comparison is inconclusive but it doesn’t make it nonsense, is implicit in my use of the phrase “may or may not be valid”.
Francis made his remark about a “fascist state” in hot temper; Toby Young repeats the 2000 UK PISA results knowing that the organisation who published them warned they should not be used for comparison. His remark about Latvia, which he has used before (substitute any eastern European country, it doesn’t matter when accuracy is ignored) was false.
So which is “vastly superior” – an ill-judged remark made in haste and instantly repented or the deliberate repetiton of misleading information?
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/8/46624007.pdf (page 1 paragraph 2, and footnote 1).
Oh, and they are sniggering because it’s funny !
Ricky – you quote OECD correctly but miss the significance of the phrase “At that time”. I repeat the quote here to save readers the bother of scrolling upwards:
“In PISA 2000, the initial response rate for the United Kingdom fell 3.7% short of the minimum requirement. At that time, the United Kingdom provided evidence to the PISA Consortium that permitted an assessment of the expected performance of the non-participating schools and on the basis of which the PISA Consortium concluded that the response-bias was likely negligible and the results were therefore … included in the international report.” In other words, the PISA Consortium decided that the 2000 data was valid then.
That was then, this is now.
OECD statisticians have looked again at the 2000 data following problems identified in 2003. When the 2009 PISA results were published OECD wrote:
“Trend comparisons, which are a feature of the PISA 2009 reporting are not reported here because for the United Kingdom it is only possible to compare 2006 and 2009 data. As the PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 samples for the United Kingdom did not meet the PISA response-rate standards, no trend comparisons are possible with these years.”
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/8/46624007.pdf (page 1, paragraph 2, and footnote 1 which repeats the quote you gave but adds an important rider which explains why OECD decided to declare the 2000 PISA results for the UK insufficiently robust to be included in trend comparisons).
Isn’t this because we tried to fiddle it by entering a dishonest selection of pupils into the test in an attempt to fudge our way up the tables ?
(OTOMH)
If so, doesn’t this say something about the government’s mentality and achievement ?
Janet
If you look at my original post you will see that not just once but twice I acknowledged the point about trends. So statisticians working on plotting trends would do well to avoid these figures. But this is a technical issue of concern only to statisticians. Even for this formal statistical modelling purposes, OECD concluded that the deficiencies were “likely negligible”. For broad brush polemics on Newsnight or SKY News, there is no problem at all.
You are taking a particular use of statistical best practice (which those using it half suggest may be overscrupulous) and wrongly implying that this invalidates the entire dataset. It doesn’t. Nor should it cramp conversation about the figures.
Ricky – what part of the sentence “no trend comparisons are possible with these years” do you fail to understand? It is not a statistical quibble.
I think you have missed the significance of the footnote in the document to which I referred you (see Appendix). After initially deciding in 2000 that the response bias “was likely negligible”, the PISA Consortium decided after further investigation that the data for 2000 and 2003 did NOT confirm that the response bias was negligible. In other words, the Consortium overturned their initial judgement about the 2000 response bias and declared that the figures should not be used for comparison.
You are trying too hard to dismiss the figures as being only a “technical issue of concern only to statisticians”. And I think it is you who is trying to “cramp conversation about the figures”.
The bottom line is that the OECD has said the figures should NOT BE USED for trend comparison. This injunction has been ignored not just by Toby Young, but Messrs Gove and Gibb and their supporters. When the Government and the media deliberately mislead the electorate, then it is essential that they are exposed.
Appendix. The footnote:
“In PISA 2000, the initial response rate for the United Kingdom fell 3.7% short of the minimum requirement. AT THAT TIME (my caps), the United Kingdom had provided evidence to the PISA Consortium that allowed for an assessment of the expected performance of the non-participating schools. On the basis of that evidence, the PISA Consortium concluded that the response bias was likely negligible and the results were included in the international report. In PISA 2003, the United Kingdom’s response rate was such that sampling standards had not been met, and a further investigation by the PISA Consortium did not confirm that the resulting response bias was negligible. Therefore, these data were not deemed internationally comparable and were not included in most types of comparisons. For PISA 2006 and PISA 2009, more stringent standards were applied, and PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 data for the United Kingdom are therefore not included in comparisons”.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/8/46624007.pdf
Janet
I’m afraid you are totally wrong about this.
It really is essentially a statistical quibble.
Look at Response Bias in England in PISA 2000 & 2003
by John Micklewright & Sylke V. Schnepf of the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute.
The researchers go back to the original 2000 and 2003 figures and work out how big an effect the response bias actually had. Helpfully, they also unbundle England’s figures from the UK scores.
For 2003, they found:
we estimate that the bias in mean scores would have shifted England’s position in a ranking of countries by only one place.
For 2000, they found:
the impact on England’s position in a ranking by mean scores is again only slight
Overall they conclude;
We judge the data for England for both 2000 and 2003 to be valuable despite the biases.
That means that the 2000 figures may be up to one ranking place adrift. They should therefore not be used for formal statistical trend analysis or drawing accurate trend lines on graphs. However, so long as Toby Young, Michael Gove etc. are discussing drops of MORE THAN one ranking place……. they are on firm ground.
http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/RR771.pdf
Ricky – the Southampton report was published in 2006. Its findings obviously didn’t convince the OECD who still said in 2010 that no trend comparisons were possible. FullFact looked at the Government’s use of the Southampton study. The article is here:
http://fullfact.org/factchecks/michael-gove-school-standards-pisa-oecd_2450
Ricky – National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) Research Brief, published by the DfE in December 2010 said this:
“OECD excluded England’s 2003 results from the international reports because too few schools took part. Expert academic analysis also raised doubts about the representativeness of England’s sample in PISA 2000″
So not only does the Government and its supporters ignore OECD warnings made in 2010 but it is ignores a research brief published by the DfE in 2010 which also warned about the unreliability of the 2000 data. Instead the Government falls back on a report published in 2006.
I notice that the Southampton report, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills during the Labour administration, is still accessible on the DfE website. It hasn’t been sent off to the National Archives like most of the other documents from Labour’s tenure. I wonder why that might be. And is the DfE providing balance by publishing the OECD document on its website that warns against the 2000 figures?
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/aboutus/
Janet
Once again you are evading the main point and misconstruing the OECD caution.
When OECD says they cannot be used for “trend comparisons” – that means for the methodologically scrupulous trend comparisons it itself conducts. NFER raises the issue of the 2009 being entirely Y11, while 2000 included some Y10s. No one disputes that either.
However, the net effect is akin to 2000 being like Camembert and 2009 like Brie. But the way you interpret it is as if one were comparing cheese with chalk. That ain’t so.
The 2006 study estimate the scale of the error the bias might give rise to and found it no grater in either 2000 or 2003 than one ranking place.
That means that finely-calibrated quantified trend analyses are not possible.
It does NOT mean that unquantified, broad-brush conclusions are invalid. Gove was referring to ranking differences of 15 or 20 places.
There are three main problems in the way Michael Gove is interpreting that PISA data – two of them statistical and one conceptual.
Firstly the two statistical issue.
We have the unreliability of the 2000 results. So as Ricky explains there is likely to be a significant degree of error on them.
The second is that Gove, like Ricky quotes the superficially significant change in ranking without looking at the change in raw scores, which is actually very small. The signficant change in ranking was due to there being a big cluster of countries with very similar scores so an extremely small change in raw score caused a big change in ranking.
Ricky’s analysis above is wrong because he is assuming that a small error would not explain the substantial difference in ranking but this is not the case because the small error would be in the raw score and as I have explained above this would lead to a large change in ranking because of the cluster effect.
Therefore the conclusion that the we had dropped down the rankings was not a reliable conclusion. I hope that’s clear now – if it’s not please do ask.
So those are the two statistical issues – now we need to look at the conceptual issue.
The thing that Gove and Gibb disturbingly misrepresent is what PISA measures. It specifically aims to measure students’ ability to work in practical contexts and to think independently. It does not test using predictable questions students can easily practice and prepare for. (TIMSS does test rote learning by the way which is why people are paying more attention to PISA these days).
There have been various underpinning factors which have driven English students’ performance in PISA type tests. The first was the original national curriculum which only dictated knowledge to be acquired and the context of Ofsted and the national framework in which it was introduced. England used to lead the world in teaching structural maths – getting students to invent creatively based on robust core understanding (that’s where Pasi Sahlberg got his inspiration) but virtually all of this was wiped out. To counter these problems the national strategy was introduced, the national curriculum was changed to explicitly require that schools taught students how to apply their knowledge, work out which knowledge to use, work on real life and connected problems and so on. Various initiatives such as Bowland were set up. GCSEs have changed and portals for teacher networking and collaboration, the MaST project and so on were established. Most of these initiatives only came along between 2005 and 2010 and were beginning to improve teaching by 2010.
The sheer madness of Gove and Gibbs comments about PISA results is that they clearly seem to believe that the way to improve them is to shut down all the evidence based systems of teacher development and teaching improvement and the networks through which best practice was disseminated, shut down the initiatives which were working and reintroduce a Victorian style disconnected learning by rote curriculum. It really excruciatingly ignorant. The whole of the the community of people who actually understand education are dumbfounded. But they’re silenced anyway by all consultation being shut down and spin agenda of this government so only the people who are listening to actual people in education would notice this.
Rebecca
without looking at the change in raw scores, which is actually very small.
That’s an interesting point. But it hardly blunts the force of Michael Gove’s argument: that in a period when education spending more or less doubled, schools did not deliver the world-beating outcomes Labour promised. On one reading, we ended up in a relatively worse place. On your reading, nothing much changed.
Either way, this is not good enough. When the taxpayer invests on this scale, she expects a tangible return.
Ricky – sorry, you’re trying too hard to dismiss an explicit warning by the organisation that published the data not to use it for comparison. In plain English the warning means, “Do not use the figures – we’ve found them to be flawed.”
You say that the warning only covers OECD and their “methodically scrupulous” comparisons. In other words it doesn’t cover those people whose use of statistics falls far short of being scrupulous – they can ignore the injunction and go in for “broad brush” polemics (euphemism for misleading statements).
However, I enjoyed your contribution with its talk of Camembert, Brie, chalk and cheese. Did you intend to use the word “grater”. If so, I enjoyed the pun.
Janet
I wish the grater had been anything other than either subconscious or a result of typing too fast in frustration.
One more try:
The leading brand of Satnav has flawed data about my street. Put in my postcode and it comes up with the next street, not mine. I have issued a warning to my friends that it is unreliable in finding my house.
But it is not so unreliable or flawed as to be completely useless. It would get you to very close to where I live. It would certainly get you to the right city. Even to the right neighbourhood.
PISA 2000 data are similar. They are a bit out. Researchers have even measured how wrong they are: around one place ranking.
So, they are no use for accurate stuff. But good enough to get you into the vicinity. Into the ballpark, even.
Perhaps all contributors would find it enlightening to scratch the surface of the Singaporean stats. That is to say, what percentage of their students actually sit the ‘O’ Levels compared to the total number of students eligible to sit then and then see the impact on the figures.
The same scrutiny is appropriate to all of education systems whether they be high stakes exam based or high school certificate based with one exam at age 17/18 which is underpinned by teacher assessment throughout the kindergarten to high school certificate (and particularly from grade/year 8/9 to 12/13: variation due to correlation between North American age groups and UK year groups).
Ricky Tarr, put a sock in your holier-that-thou hole, you faux-pious gobshite.
Ricky Tarr, you have little faith in Francis for losing his rag, who doesn’t, but no fear of putting your faith in a renowned coke head. Fuck off and troll somewhere else