Britain loses when we make everyone a winner in A-levels
The date is 1865, the place Wonderland, and little Alice, having fallen down a rabbit hole, is dripping wet after swimming in a sea of tears.
So, on the advice of the Dodo, Alice and the other animals take part in a Caucus Race.
According to the children’s classic: ‘They began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over.’
At the end they crowded around the Dodo, clamouring, ‘Who has won?’
Michael Gove's attempt to end grade inflation has met with Ofqual's intervention to 'prevent' students from getting bad grades
There was a long pause, while the Dodo thought. Then, at last, it produced the answer: ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!’
When Lewis Carroll wrote those words more than 150 years ago, he meant to satirise the incestuous nature of Victorian politics.
He could scarcely have imagined that they would become the guiding principle of 21st-century Britain’s educational establishment.
As hundreds of thousands of parents (and their offspring) will know, this Thursday is A-level results day — the day of judgment, when dreams will be realised and hopes dashed in every street in the country.
Yet even before the results have been announced, it appears that today’s equivalent of the Dodo, the exam regulator Ofqual, has been fiddling the figures in an attempt to ensure that all have prizes.
As it happens, this is the first year that students have taken exams under the new system designed by the former education secretary Michael Gove, who was keen to end the curse of relentless grade inflation.
But as Ofqual’s head, Sally Collier, explained over the weekend, she has decided to intervene in the marking process to ‘protect’ students from getting bad grades.
Even though Mr Gove’s reforms were designed specifically to differentiate between different students, Ms Collier is having none of it.
In her own words, she has decided to lower the marking thresholds to make sure that there are just as many ‘winners’ as there were last year — even though this makes a mockery of the new system.
‘I want the message to be that students have done fantastically well,’ she explained defiantly. ‘All our kids are brilliant!’
‘All our kids are brilliant.’ It’s the kind of thing you can just about tolerate from a painfully earnest headmistress. From the head of the government’s exam regulator, however, it is not merely embarrassing but downright horrifying.
Reforms to differentiate between students have been criticised by Sally Collier
Since I often go into schools to give history talks, I know how hard many of our teenagers work. Indeed, I am not ashamed to say that many of them work an awful lot harder than my friends and I did.
To claim that they are all brilliant, though, is utterly fatuous. Quite obviously many of them are very far from brilliant.
For example, if I had done physics A-level, or indeed art at the most rudimentary level, I would not have been brilliant. I would have been abysmal.
The ‘all our kids are brilliant’ ethos dates from the Seventies, when a generation of progressive educationalists, kicking against the strictness of their school days, argued that all students should be encouraged to feel like winners, even when they palpably weren’t.
There was perhaps a grain of sense in this. In previous decades, too many students had been cruelly written off too soon as moronic failures, dumped into failing secondary moderns and denied the chance of a university education.
Even so, the progressive ethos spiralled out of control. You can still see vestiges of it today at sports days where all the children are awarded medals, even if they rolled across the line several hours after beginning the 100 metres.
Nowhere was the damage more obvious, though, than in the assessment of A-levels. By the New Labour years, it had become a familiar ritual.
'New Labour and Tony Blair encouraged the progressive ethos to spiral out of control'
Every August, as students rejoiced in better results than ever, the latest education minister took to the airwaves to parrot some variation on Ms Collier’s ‘all our kids are brilliant’ line. The statistics tell the story. Out of more than 850,000 grades awarded in 2010, more than one in four were A or A*. Even in 2016, years after Mr Gove had promised to crack down on the all-must-have-prizes ethos, 25.8 per cent of grades were A or A*.
‘So what?’ you may well be asking. ‘Why not give every student an A?’
Well, one obvious answer is that it defeats the point of the exercise. Teenagers are not doing A-levels for fun; they are doing them so that employers and, in particular, universities can identify the brightest and most promising students.
Some years ago, as a university admissions tutor, I used to plough through hundreds of applications. Form after form carried the same list of GCSE grades — A, A, A, A, A — as well as the same list of predicted A-level grades — A, A, A.
It was impossible to tell them apart. Now it is even worse. In 2016, more than 41 per cent of maths students got an A or A*, as well as 39 per cent of German students, 37 per cent of French students and 32 per cent of Classics students.
What’s the point of that? How on earth can you expect universities to pick out the brilliant students, if thousands of them are getting the best grades? Hence Mr Gove’s reforms. The point was to make exams harder, but not for some strangely twisted sadistic purposes.
The point was to have a greater range of results, so top universities, as well as future employers, could get a better sense of students’ ability.
Alas, Sally Collier and colleagues — the dreaded progressive educational ‘blob’ against which Mr Gove regularly inveighed — are evidently determined to undermine the whole exercise.
'We should not be afraid to differentiate between good and bad students'
By fiddling the figures, they want to make everybody look like winners — which will go down well with anxious students and their relieved parents, but will turn the exam season back into a nonsense.
Who loses from all this? Everybody. The brightest and hardest working students end up being cheated, because if everybody gets stellar grades, their efforts are devalued.
Universities lose out, too, because it is impossible for them to know what they are getting. As the novelist and lecturer Tibor Fischer wrote a couple of weeks ago, only six people out of his class of 120 English students could answer the question ‘what is a sentence?’ You can’t tell me that the 114 others were ‘brilliant’.
Above all, Britain loses. Of course, we can follow Ms Collier and delude ourselves that we have reared an unprecedented generation of geniuses.
Yet the most recent league tables published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed Britain far behind the likes of Singapore, Japan, Finland, South Korea and Australia in science, as well as 21st in reading and a pitiful 27th in maths. So much, then, for all those A* grades.
No parent wants their child to do badly, let alone to fail. But we should not be afraid to differentiate between good and bad students, both to pick out the best performers and to save the rest from wasting their time and money at university.
If we continue to pump them up with false results and exaggerated praise, we are doing them no favours. We will end up with a generation of cosseted, over-entitled youngsters, for whom the harsh pressures of reality will come as a terrible shock. And even as the Sally Colliers of the world tell us how brilliant we are, Britain will carry on drifting into mediocrity and decline.
For there are, after all, two things worth knowing about the Dodo. One is that it thought everybody must have prizes. The other is that it died out. I fear there is an omen there, unfortunately.